Before you choose plants, decide if you want to Do in-ground gardening, raised bed or container and pots gardenIng. Then decide what you want in each of the spaces you have to use: flowers, herbs or veggies. Then in late spring prep the soil so it can air out before you plant. Good soil feeds the plants. A mix of sand, black dirt and peat moss will grow just about anything. Plant only when the last frost is gone. When it frosts again, the season is done. Cleanup.
Winter is a great time to plan, research and design the garden layout on graph paper. Even if it's all in pots, plan their location by observing how many hours of sun each area gets a day. You can move pots around to get more or less light as needed. You can stack pots on a plank and cinder block shelf. Consider how you will get water to each area. Hand carrying is back breaking.
Once you know what you want, then google easy to grow mixed part sun/part shade plants for your region. Growing regions have numbers assigned to indicate growing conditions in each zone.
Most herbs like sun most of the day, veggies like cool early morning and hot afternoons. Flowers don't all bloom at the same season. Yea, it can drive you nuts. So research plants for your zone and their requirements, then provide what they want.
"No evil goes where basil grows. Rosemary for remembrance." Basil & rosemary have cooking and multiple magical uses but different growing requirements. Basil can handle some mixed sun and shade, while rosemary likes more sun, hot and dry. They are very fragrant. Oregano and mint need to be confined in pots or with a border because they spread and choke out other plants. Fortunately oregano dies off in winter! I'd in-ground planted mint seed just once 20'years ago and it's still with me. It is self replicating and thrives on neglect (my kind of plant!
), thus it is my main prosperity, protection, psychism, health, cleansing, spirituality plant buddy.
Marigolds ( keep bugs away), carrots and radishes are dead easy to grow in-ground or pots or 5-gal. buckets. Sun loving green "string" beans and tomatoes also can grow in buckets or in-ground and need to be staked for support. Cucumbers also do well in ground or pots, even hanging pots.
Speaking of hanging, you can use a pocketed, hanging pouch on a fence to grow herbs, if it gets sun 6 hours a day.
Pumpkins and squash vines are huge & spread out to trip the unwary passer-by, and they consume huge amounts of water to grow fruit. I don't recommend them, but have grown them in my small fenced back yard. They were not worth the work, and disposal of the long vines at year end clean up is a pain in the buttox in the city.
I've never used a greenhouse, but a coworker had a portable plastic covered one. She said it was too small, about 4'x4', but it did work. The shelf kind can be set on top of a table to make it easier to reach. Soil has to be above 50'F for seeds to grow.