All great advice here, a few things I'd like to add:-
1 - a great website for newbie veggie gardeners like myself is this one:-
http://www.gardenate.com/ Just set your climate zone and it tells you what to plant for each month. I have found it very useful. I'm still learning about growing veggies, and have only had small yields so far mainly due to a small patch and not spending enough time on it, but it's so satisfying eating what you have grown. We had a bumper crop of tomatoes, capsicums and spring onions from a small area and the taste was superb. Didn't do so well with cucumber, zuchini & squash type things - got mildew on them all.
2 - Starting a fresh budget is HARD, especially if you've never done one and you do it properly, the phsycological aspect of assigning your money to everything, and I mean everything, makes it look like you have very little left. Once you have stuck to it for a while though, it becomes invaluable.
Our budget is a simple excel spreadsheet. We do as other have said and never carry cash, it's so much easier to track your expenses and utilize your virtual canisters on the spreadsheet. We keep all our receipts, then fire up the spreadsheet and online banking statement and check off the receipts against the spreadsheet.
When I say budget everything, I do mean everything. We sat down a few years back and listed everything we pend money on, like house insurance, car reg, ambulance cover etc - all the anual bills as well as just the monthly living allowance stuff. We then split each bill by 12 and listed it on a spreadsheet. Each month, the pots for the annual things get their 1/12 share first, that way once your annual bills start rolling around you always have the money to cover. It's difficult for the first few months or so, especially if you normally pay your insurance monthly as we doubled up so that the next time it was due we could pay in a lump sum instead, saving the charges for splitting monthly. After 12 months it's great, you're running with your budget and you can adjust your figures accordingly to suit increases in annual bills.
Our budget excel sheet is a very simple list of dates down one column, next column has income, next outgoings and a running tall. We pre-populate income and fixed expenses (like the bills allowance, grocery budget etc) and the difference between income and whats left at the end of the month is allotted as savings. That way, the monthly tally always runs at zero, it makes it easier to stick to as if you punch in an expense that takes you over budget the monthly tally turns negative and you have to reduce your allotted savings for that month to cover It makes you think more about where you're money is going when you see your 'savings' reduce in real time each month.
The savings part is what is left between total income and the budgeted expenses so that the daily spreadsheet can run a monthly tally of zero, (or whatever float figure you want).
Em is paid monthly, I am paid fortnightly. We base in the income budget on me having only 2 pays per month, that way, twice a year I have a bonus fortnights pay that's 'un-allocated' and other goes in the holiday pot or get blown on something frivolous.
We also base our weekly budget on 5 weeks a month, most months are only 4 weeks so we have a float of one weeks allowance. We allow $340 per week, (only 2 of us), but we eat well, eat out and buy some grog on that. We're usually a little over budget each week, but the 5th week allowance on a 4 week month takes up the slack.
I'll try and attach our annual budget that gets tweaked every year, add your own figures and pre-populate a calender spreadsheet to track the actual expenses and see how you go.
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