I just started an assassin and I wan to make use of alchemy. I've never used it in any ES game, so I'm totally inexperienced with it. I've just been guessing when making potions. Mixing random ingredients together hoping for a potion. I burn through a ton or ingredients doing this and tend to get a lot of useless potions or failures. I understand that combining ingredients with the same effects gives you a potion, but that's about it. Any suggestions would be great, just don't list any potions/poisons for me!

eat ingrediants to find there effects. when you see an affect that damages you mix it with another ingrediant that damages you in the same way to make the poison

I ate a stack of like, 20 flowers and only unlocked 1 effect before. Is that normal?