With basil growing, there's no harvest time as such. You can use it as soon as it's big enough to withstand having a few leaves pinched off, if you just need a few leaves for a tomato salad or something. Try to let it grow reasonably first or it may not recover. Or you can harvest whole plants and use the lot to make stuff like pesto. If you cut it to the ground, it normally doesn't come back. With growing basil, it's usually better when it's fairly youthful, if you see flower buds forming, these come at the tips of the leaves, in Europe, normally after midsummer, just pinch those out, just the tips, to keep the plant juvenile. Basil is something that benefits, once it's reached a reasonable size, from frequent and gentle nipping, so it's great in the summer months for adding a handful of leaves every few days to salads or pasta or whatevs.
With rosemary, like basil, all herbs, if you want you can eat the flowers too. They can look really lovely in a salad or used as a garnish. If you don't need them and they're not going to age and coarsen the plants (with herbs, the ones that'll do this are basil, mint and some of the more recherche ones, like dill, mainly soft stemmed herbs rather than woody shrubby ones like thyme or rosemary), anyway on the woody stemmers, like rosemary, leave the flowers for the bees if you aren't going to eat them. Bees love herb flowers.
If you grow lavender, be aware, you'll keep your plant far better if you prune it once a year, northern hemisphere, this would be around August/September, after flowering but before any frost. Cut back each stem to above the last point where you can see leaves or growth. With lavender, if you cut back, into the wood where there are no leaves, the stem will almost certainly die off. If you don't prune lavender, it will grow out, getting woody and dying off in the middle. Pruning keeps the plant younger, extends its life (lavenders usually only live about 10-15 years).
On the preparation of your yard, Ferris, can I suggest the number one thing to do is get your soil right. You only get one chance to blitz a garden and really prepare it and that's the start. So learn about weeds - check out perennial weeds, there are weeds out there that, if you leave the smallest bit of root in your soil will come right back and multiply. So do research.
Evaluate that soil - do some reading about soil types. Generally, if land is lying fallow, you can see from the wild plants growing on it, what kind of soil you have - rich fertile and well balanced and drained or something that needs more work, improving drainage, incorporating material that will increase acidity or alkalinity and so on, there is no substitute for reading about this.
Look at aspect, is the site shady, windy, wet? Plan to do something about those issues if you need to (plant windbreaks or increase drainage).
Clear out rubbish and weeds (once you've identified them as weeds), diligently, you'll only do it once, so do it right.
And then dig that land, go through it by hand. Try doing a small area at a time or you may get down hearted. Invest in a rotovator if it a huge patch. Don't walk on your soil once you've dug.
Onward and upward, learn, read, handle the soil. There is so much more. Enjoy this time. :)
