So many folks are looking to start a garden for the first time, and now is a great time to begin. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can grow most fruit and veg in containers. Start with the best potting soil you can find, water thoroughly every other day (probably daily when it gets hot), mulch the soil surface if you can, and feed once a week with an organic, low-nutrient fertilizer like fish emulsion. Grow bags are a great alternative to pots and have a lot of built in benefits such as allowing the roots to air prune, and they are mostly made out of recycled plastic. You’ll need at least a 10 gallon container for each tomato, but you can fit two peppers in that size pot, and many more lettuces.
Seeds are cheap and many things grow better from seed (cucumbers, squash, peas); however I have heard that many seed companies are running low on stock. You can check on my recommendations page for the seed houses buy from each year. You can start almost anything from seed except tomatoes and peppers - it is too late now to start those from seeds, so you’ll need to buy seedlings.
I’ve just learned that the Master Gardeners are selling the 24,000 plants they raised for their sales this year out of Orchard Nursery in Lafayette. All orders are online, with curbside pickup. There’s many different kinds of tomatoes and lots of peppers to choose from. Orchard is also selling many other veg starts as well as herbs and fruit trees/canes/bushes. I can’t speak for the other veg, but the tomatoes and peppers raised by the Master Gardeners will be far superior to anything you can buy at big box or hardware stores. The proceeds from these sales also benefit their local programs for gardeners, which is terrific. You can get your potting soil from Orchard, too - I like the organic Bumper Crop, but have also had good success with Paydirt.
This is a great project to do with kids, and absolutely fulfills science requirements. While inspecting your plants for bugs is a good idea, resist the ‘urge to purge.’ Do not spray your plants with any kind of insecticide. If you notice bugs like aphids or caterpillars, it is totally appropriate to remove them with your hands. First you might enjoy photographing them and posting your photo to iNaturalist, or removing them and studying them and learning about them. Again, this is science! (I recently completed a multiple-intelligences unit for my Psych class, and one of the ways people learn is through nature, so why not incorporate it into your home schooling curriculum?)
Even if you don’t have kids at home, gardening is something that can take you into a State of Flow and out of the State of the World, which is probably a really good thing right now. You might find that it becomes the thing that shapes your day. And you already know that a fresh tomato out of the garden (in season) is better than anything Safeway is going to deliver you. So why not go for it? And if you run into any problems, please contact me and we will work through those problems together. You can do it!