Honestly, I learned much of this by having my significant other do hundreds of hours of research (they enjoy learning about plants), and much more by personal experience.

Raised garden beds do live up to most of the hype. There is still weeding to do because seeds fall down into the bed, but it's reduced from what you get on the ground.

There's an art to choosing where to plant things and I'm afraid it comes down to trial and error due to differing micro-climates.

For example, put the peas in full sun and they'll be dead by June or July at best. Put them in full sun and then plant something that is tall enough to shade them that will grow up by mid-May and you can extend that pea harvest longer. Of course if you fail to water them, even for one day (or multiple times a day on hot sunny days), they're going to wither and die. I wish this were an exaggeration.

Another example is that we planted 3 pawpaw trees at the same time, probably about 7 years ago now. All in full sun, but one of them was a foot or two lower in elevation than the others. That one is about 30cm tall. The middle one is just over a meter tall and only has a few small branches. The largest one is about 2 meters tall and has a bunch of nice looking branches and is a great shape. The difference? The cold air fell down to where the small one was and it got harsher frosts in the Spring when it was young, which set it back considerably (2 years in a row!). The medium one was that we didn't weed around it often enough, and so it was starved for light. We also made the mistake of not mulching around them when we planted them, which means the grass was preventing them from absorbing the quantity of water that they wanted. We have 2 of 3 of then mulched now and plan on mulching the third one, probably this year.

But you look online and what do people say? You **should** mulch around your trees. It sounds optional, and if you're willing to wait 15 years before you get your first fruit, and possibly have to start over sometimes, I guess it is optional. We are ~7 years in and we saw exactly one fruit start to set between the three of them (and we never got that one either, it probably went to some animal).

Other times people seem to imply a bunch of things are vital and we've found we can just skip that extra work and it turns out just fine.

My best advice, read when the seed packets say, and then just try some stuff. Knowing how to diagnose what went wrong is key, and there are often guides for that based on what you're seeing. For example, "help, my kale leaves have holes" will lead you to some insect is eating them, and then you'll find out it's likely cabbage moths (and can visually confirm it by catching one in the act), and then you can search for how to deal with cabbage moths.

If you can't tell if something is too much water of not enough (they symptoms can be very similar), just go one way and see if it gets better or worse. It takes time and effort, but if you want homegrown food, that's the price you have to pay.