You can grow tons of things in a flower garden. You need to start now in preparing your soil. I suggest you go to the library and check out
Square Foot Gardening. It will tell you everything you need to know about gardening in a small area. With that said, in South Carolina you can grow green beans, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, and onions in your flower bed. You can grow many other things, but those are easiest. You can start onions now and they might make it through the winter. What I do is take a regular onion....cut off some the bottom where the tiny roots are.....put it in the ground and cover it with soil. You will get green onions from this for free from the onion you buy at the store. I go out and clip off the tops and add them to food that I am cooking or salads. In Houston, we planted strawberries as ground cover in our front flower beds. They tend to take over like grass, but they make a gorgeous ground cover with white blooms and red berries. Lettuce comes in all sorts of colors and will look great in your front flower bed planted in between bushes and flowers for added interest. You can buy a mix from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I buy the Stir Fry mix. It is beautiful colors of purple, green, dark green and even red.
The fruit trees are a little harder, If you don't want to fool with lots of spraying, I recommend fig trees and blueberry bushes for fruit. Apples, peaches, and plums take lots of work and dormant oil spray to make fruit without worms in them. I use my chickens to patrol the fruit which helps me, but you can't do that in a subdivision.
If you have a fence around your back yard, add raised beds around the fence and plant pretty vegetables. You can plant peppers in a variety of colors next May and will wind up with some of the prettiest beds in the subdivision. Share your peppers with neighbors and they will be even happier with you.
If you let your kid raise a rabbit or two in a hutch in the back yard, you will have the best manure in the world absolutely for free. In South Carolina, you will have to freeze 2 litre water bottles and put them in with your rabbits to help them cool off in the summer. If you raise the right breed, you would also have a meat source in the event of a disaster.
Check out this terrific web site
http://www.gardengirltv.com/ for other ideas on building raised beds and adding rabbits to your landscape. She is over the top with how much she raises in her yard, but you will get some great ideas.
Plant herbs (basil, oregano, rosemary, and dill) in large pots. The rosemary will make anyone coming to your house linger with the beautiful smell. You can actually buy pots of rosemary at Christmas time at Lowes and Home Depot. They make beautiful Christmas decorations. We actually kept ours on the front porch until there was a freeze warning and then brought them inside. Mine is still growing from last year.
The problem with containers is over or under watering. I invested in a small water meter for house plants and use it to check my containers for water. I feed the containers coffee grounds and compost. I bury food scraps deep in the container and they rot. You may not want to do this if you have a dog. The dog will dig up the rotting food and destroy your container. You don't want to overdo the burying food scraps thing, but the book I mentioned above will walk you through how to compost. You can buy commercial fertilizer, but using it on your soil will kill the earth worms. Remember that gardening is all about the soil and the earthworms are the soil workhorse.
You can do this. I used to kill houseplants, but have been gardening for years and years. When my kids were small, we fed our family of 4 from two tiny plots of garden. The trick is the soil. It has to be in peak condition. The better the soil. The better the vegetables, flowers and herbs.
