Gardens/Farms

As far as I remember, the garden technology gives you currently a bonus to garden (+1 or something). You can only build one garden per town anymore

But then I can never get any bigger population in the town. It cant grow past town lvl 2....

You'll need to find the proper resource to place a farm, farms and other food resources are essential to the growth of a town, however fisheries are often an option to supplement your incoming food. Even places without beaches should be able to place fisheries if they are near the coast, although I believe they may eventually incur a penalty/not receive a bonus from being on a beach. You won't be able to spam gardens as effectively in beta 2, but once you research the proper tech and begin harvesting food resources you should be able to grow your cities.

If you want to get more food than just a garden will provide, you need to build your city near a food resource (fertile ground, bees, fruit trees). Farms, apiaries, etc require those special tiles.

Ah I see, so to properly make a town prosper you need like smaller villages which will supply you with food, and you can decide if you want to make your main town bigger or not. Which means you wont end up with 10 metropolises, in the late turns.

I do find that in the early game it is best to adopt the technique you describe, if you want to have one town that levels fairly quickly. But if you get a few farms under your control, each time you researched advanced farming techniques you'll be able to build a few more houses. As long as most of your towns have some food resource, you should be able to get fairly large populations in all of your towns. 

In the earlier betas, at the start of the game your sovereign was always placed close to a tile of fertile land, suitable for building a farm on.  In Beta 2 this seems to no longer be the case.  In only one of the Beta 2 games I've played has a food source been visible within the vision range of my sovereign at the start, and it was "twilight bees".  In that game I founded a city there and tried to research apiary, but crashed out of memory on turn 80 before ever getting apiary as a choice even though I spent all my research on civilization.  In the other games I had to wander 13 turns or more before I found either a fertile land tile or an orchard tile.

So it seems like Beta 2 calls for a different style of play - found your first city wherever you start, regardless of nearby resources, so as to get your research started as soon as possible, and then wander around looking for a source of food to take with your second city.

Or it will works the other way as well. Wander around a bit and recruit until you have 150-200 Gildars left, then put down a City to start up your Research and then move out. Luck may find you a good recruit or 2 and a Special tile.

While this is possible, it is just as easy to research into the the 'harvest' technologies for the correct form of food product that your map has.  Generally, all the maps I have seen have TONS of wild bees.  Send a pioneer (trainable unit) to this locations, and they have a special option to harvest.

Food on the map is super plentiful.  Food should not be a problem with a bit of research.

Oh pioneers can harvest? I dident know that x)

The resource has to be in a certain radius from a city for the pioneer to be able to make use of it.  I haven't quite figured out how far (inside your cultural boundaries at the least I think but could be wrong, I need to test that).  Move the pioneer to the resource and see if the 'settle' option is highlighted.  If not, wait around until it is (assuming it eventually does become highlighted).

I've had resources in my cultural borders that weren't highlighted.  Some eventually were, some not, in the several hundred turns I played after moving a pioneer there.

Regarding starting strategies -- settle right away then explore or explore first, if both are equally viable (so far it seems to be so) that's the sign of good game design.

Pioneers can harvest food related resources with no distance restriction. You do however take a 50% production hit until your City gets in range. Shards can be captured as well from a distance, but you do not get credit for them until the city is in range. (3-4 tiles I believe)

Many resources require a Town to capture (Oasis, Scenic View being 2 I remember) and the game usually tells you that if you click the Resource when the Pioneer is on it. Not enough Gildars will also keep a resource dark with a Pioneer on it.