Food for thought or ... or nought!

Everybody's growing food, and I'm terrified all those stylish, professionally designed gardens I've so admired over the years will be dug up and converted to serious vege patches bordered by messy mounds of smashed egg shells and squeezed oranges pretending they're going to be fabulous compost one day.
Despite my own inclination to grow food, I'm so far managing to avoid the Te Radar look and have separated the food/compost production area from the elegant part of the garden and, hopefully, never the twain shall meet.
Having said that, I am a complete convert to vegetable gardening and, like all converts, I'm zealous and full of advice for those even newer to the cause than I am. So - if you want to grow food, here's my list:
Don't grow food in containers unless you're happy with two lettuces a month and a pot of leggy basil. Not only does a bit of slug-gnawed cos look grotty on the deck, but the effort that goes into it would be better spent developing a decent-sized vege patch with good soil and enough food to actually feed you and yours.
If you haven't gardened much before, don't try to do it all, unless you have all the time in the world. Otherwise you'll run yourself ragged learning to compost, buying 27 different kinds of fertiliser, digging, planting, trimming, weeding, conditioning soil, collecting seed, propagating and artificially pollinating four different kinds of fruit trees to try to grow a passionfruit/apple hybrid.
Work out what you and your family want to eat and how to grow it (if you want to eat only onions and potatoes it may be cheaper and easier to buy them). I decided I'd grow only things that made me gasp at the vege counter: "They can't be serious - $3 for a capsicum."
This past summer I grew four different kinds of capsicums, one of which turned out to be a chilli, one of which died, one of which was green (I wanted yellow and red) and produced peppers the size of golf balls, and one of which is only now producing weird, mud-coloured things which look alien but taste fine. Not wonderful, but fine.
I also grew garlic, but didn't know enough to feed it continually and harvested a mediocre crop which will last me for a couple of months. Now I know exactly what to do and this time I'll grow enough to last the whole year.
Get good information. I've been told some astonishing things about gardening by all manner of people, some of which is really useful and some of which is complete bollocks.
The internet is also guilty of perpetuating many an urban myth. Choose reputable sites with advice and contributions by people whose names you recognise, or who run nurseries you've at least heard of.
Buy old-fashioned books by well-known New Zealand gardeners at second-hand bookshops and swot them up. Lie in bed at the weekends with big mugs of tea and listen to Simon Farrell and Ruud Kleinpaste (Newstalk ZB, 7am Saturday and 7am Sunday) talking sense about gardening.
If, like me, you are committed to having a well-designed, stylish garden, don't sacrifice form for function - you can have both. If you're serious about growing food on an ongoing basis, designate an area for your vege beds and associated work areas (shed, compost and rubbish bins, piles of topsoil and mulch) and screen them off with fencing, trellis and/or plants. They'll soon become attractive areas in their own right.
Flash up your vege patch by adding a couple of big terracotta pots for mint (one of the few things best grown in a pot unless you actually want it racing from one end of your section to the other) an ornamental dwarf citrus just to look pretty, and a garden seat shaded by an umbrella where you will probably never have time to sit with a garden magazine.