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I'll be following along, looking for hints and ideas as a rookie vegetable growing hobbiest myself.
I started container vegetable growing on my deck about 4 years ago, started out with one container for a couple of tomato plants and got a bit carried away and ended up with eight containers spread across my deck. Due to tomato wilt, pests and rookie mistakes I didnt get a great harvest that year. The only successful harvests were a mountain of tomatillos (which we had no idea what to do with so most went to waste) and a buttload of Habanero peppers (which were a pretty bright shiny orange, but made any recipe taste worse).
Last couple of years I'd been a bit half-assed, occasional tomato plants but not the full set of containers, so this year was the first full return for Farmer Critch's Container Garden of Bounty.
Successes were tomatoes (10 assorted cherry and grape tomato plants provided regular handfuls of tomatoes, and kept Fatty the Groundhog visiting my deck every day), cucumbers (4 plants giving around a cucumber per day over the summer), Jalapenos (two plants, about 100 peppers picked and popped in freezer bags. Only ate one straight from the plant, it tasted of pain and burning), snow peas (from seeds, got a couple of bowl-fulls out of them), and eggplants (there's still about 10 on the plants, but we're sick of eggplants now). Courgettes just about earned their place after a slow start, and Squash plants were a waste of time (two plants produced 1 squash and about 40 billion squash bugs).
End of July/Beginning of August I tried clearing out some space for a second planting. Spinach, Turnips, Kale, Chard, Collards and Broccili all from seed. It's not worked out well, the previously mentioned NoVa rainy season held things back and then something came onto my deck and bit off all the leaves (maybe a deer, seen them on my deck before). The plants are bouncing back now, resprouting leaves despite squirrels digging in my containers, but first predicted frost is about 10 days away so probably too late. Looks like the second planting will result in no veggies.
Plans for next year are my containers again, plus adding two 12x6 raised garden areas in my back yard below the deck. I thought 2x12x6 was a bit ambitious until reading some of the plans on here.
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