Defining your desired direction will provide you with a framework for evaluating the space you have to work with. Whatever you choose to grow, remember that your initial feelings of satisfaction and success are likely to be inversely proportional to the initial size of your garden. Like children, gardens require the greatest concentration of time in the first years of life. This is particularly true for your first garden, when everything is new to you. Consider that you are changing what the earth is in the habit of growing in this space.
True change is gradual.
A plan that is too ambitious often results in a mindset in opposition to nature, a war pitting gardener against pests, weeds, and unyielding earth. Ideals tend to get lost in the heat of those battles. When overwhelmed, you might consider chemical reinforcements, thinking that the means may appear to justify the end. That's not true. Gardening is all about means, about process, about working with the earth.