mary mary quite contrary how does your garden grow...

this past wednesday we went out to the church farm (they have 100 acres of land down by the river) and started to plant a garden...now mind you that we have never had a garden before and have little idea of what to do...oh sure, growing up our parents had gardens, but they TOLD us what to do and we did it...so we know we need to pull weeds and water when it's dry and of course we know how to plant stuff...but timing, we have no concept of timing...like apparently we're late on the potatoes, but they "should" still grow, and we may have missed the boat on our peas and beans...we also planted carrots and lettuce so far and they too may be too late to be getting in the ground...oh, and other than the potatoes, and the corn and pumpkins we have yet to plant, all the seeds are like 3 yrs old :-S so we're hoping that seeds don't expire and that we'll still get a decent crop of each thing...it would be wild if ALL of it came up because then we'd have WAY too much of some things....like we planted 2 types of peas...the kind you shell and then the kind you leave in the pod, and then we have 3 rows of potatoes, which i don't think will be too much as we really like potatoes, and if we do have too much we can donate some to someone else that may need potates...same w/ the peas...i probably planted way too many seeds in each of the carrot and lettuce locations, but they were super tiny in my defense and i had no idea how many i should do so and taking into account that they were 3 yrs old i did quite a few in each spot/hole in hopes that at least 1 or 2 would come up from each batch...now watch, they'll all come up and i'll have to thin out like hundreds of little plants...which i must admit i wonder if when you thin them out, can you plan those somewhere else if you've not damaged the root system too much? anyways, we need to go back out today (hopefully we'll have time) and get the corn and other things in the ground that we want to plant...oh and it rained last night, which is a good thing because now i don't have to haul buckets of water up from the river to water the plants, BUT it might be too muddy to even go out and finish planting and we won't be here at all next week so by time we can get stuff in the ground it may be WAY too late for any decent crop...i'm really hoping it's not too muddy, if at all...it would be nice if the top was at least somewhat dried up...we'll find out later i guess...