greenllama, Welcome to the forum. Your balcony garden is gorgeous! I hope you won't let changing from container gardening to in-ground gardening intimidate you. You can do it. As already has been mentioned here, just take it slow. I wouldn't try to transform the whole back yard in the first year. Our weather here can drive gardeners to distraction, but honestly, most of what happens is pretty easy to overcome. Tornadoes and floods probably are the most challenging, in terms of the amount of time and the recovery time needed. Hail? It happens. You prune off the damage, clean up the mess, hold your head high and carry on. You wont believe how quickly the plants recover and regrow. I am not in the OKC area. I am way down south just north of the Red River across the state line from Gainesville, TX, so the big hail that so often seems to plague a lot of central OK and northern OK normally is not an issue here. I don't know how often the folks in the OKC area get hail, but in my location we get it once or twice a year, here in Love County and only in 1 year of the 15 years we've been here has the hail truly demolished my garden to the point that I just wanted to cry. (I didn't cry though. Oklahoma gardeners don't cry!) That was hail roughly the size of golf balls or slightly larger with a few larger than an extra large hen's egg. I haven't had baseball or softball sized hail since moving here, though we had it a couple of times in Texas before we moved here. We have had hail the size of baseballs to softballs in our county, but about 15 miles north of our house. I hope that size of hail never finds us. I keep floating row cover (both heavyweight and lightweight) handy, as well as bird netting and chicken wire, and can throw those over plants to protect them pretty quickly if hail threatens. I don't worry so much about ornamental plants because they bounce back quickly, but try to protect corn plants (because if the plants' growing tips are damaged, you don't get corn) when they are young and small enough to be covered, and tomato plants for obvious reasons. To me, the fear of having hail hit the garden and destroy it is worse than actually having it happen---so far, the damage we have seen from hail has been far less than I thought it would be when the hail actually was falling. It amazes me how awful the hail sounds hitting the roof, walls and windows and yet, when you walk outside, the damage to plants isn't all that bad. Once we went about 3 or 4 years without hail, but then the law of averages caught up to us and we had it 11 times in one year. Luckily, it was small every time---from pea-sized to nickle-sized, and the damage was minimal. So, I wouldn't worry about it that much----the odds of hail hitting your specific garden real often probably are lower than you think. Even when big hail hits, it often does damage only over a few square miles. Rain rarely damages my garden. I cannot speak for anyone else because some of the folks in other parts of OK get more of those torrential rainstorms with flash flooding than I do. My problem normally is a lack of rain, which is an entirely different issue. The important thing is to either select property with a well-draining sandy loam soil, or be prepared to spend time and money improving dense clay if that is what you end up with. I have mostly clay with a few veins of sand running through it here and there. In the clay-ey areas, I have raised beds where I've done tons of soil amendment. In the areas with the sandier soil, I've done less amending and do not have raised beds.(Raised beds with sandy soil drain too quickly in our climate some years.....) If you've never gardened in the ground in the city, remember that there can be all sorts of buried lines....water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, and in some areas, electric lines, phone lines, etc. so before you dig, call and get the stuff underground marked with little flags so you know where not to dig. Getting the area marked is a free service. Wind is an issue and someone already mentioned the need for windbreaks. I try to site planting beds where they are sheltered from strong north and south winds by buildilngs, trees and shrubs, etc. Where that is not possible, I grow lots of vines on the garden fence to help block wind and also grow tall plants like cannas to serve as wind breaks. I also choose ornamental plants that are pretty tolerant of the kind of conditions we have here. I avoid anything that needs lots of moisture and lots of pampering. I like tough plants that take a lot of weather abuse and just keep blooming their heads off. SInce you're in zone 8 and will be moving to zone 7, you'll have to adjust planting dates a couple of weeks later than what you're used to. I only moved 80 miles north when we left Texas (Fort Worth) and moved here, so can plant almost as early here as we did there as long as I am prepared to toss floating row cover over the plants on occasional late nights. (Don't get me started on the increasing frequency of the occasional late cold nights we've had the last few years! They drive me up the wall.) I'm in a cold microclimate in the Red River Valley so even though my average last frost date is March 28th, in 5 of the last 6 years, we have had sporadic cold nights with freezing temperatures and killing frost through the first week in May. If I didn't have floating row covers, I would be stark raving mad by this point. So, you don't have to fear OK weather too much---you just learn to adopt practices that take into account the fact that our weather conditions change a lot. I try to ignore the weather and do what I need to do on the schedule that is best for me and my plants. For a long time, I would put off planting and put it off and put it off because the chance of hail was in the forecast seemingly every day. I wouldn't transplant plants on a given day because it "might" hail. Of course, it never hailed and I regretted postponing planting. I could wait for three weeks and that hail never came even though it constantly was in the forecast, and then I'd transplant on a sunny morning (with no hail in the forecast), and hail would fall from a storm that afternoon that seemingly popped up out of nowhere. So, I stopped letting the weather control my choices. Now I just plant when I want to and then hope I am at home to cover up plants if the weather starts turning threatening. We certainly cannot control what the weather does here, so we just learn how to work with what we get. I think you'll love living here and gardening here. The people are the best people you'll find anywhere, and the weather is.....hmmmm.......never boring. Because I was an experienced gardener when we moved here, I started really small the first year with two raised beds that I think were about 4' wide and 10' long. I knew better than to create more planting space than I could maintain. I crammed a huge number (as in too many) of plants into those raised beds that first year. Then, every year after that, we broke more ground and improved the soil and built raised beds.. It is smarter to start small with a manageable amount than to bite off more than you can chew and get discouraged because fighting the weeds and pests drive you up the wall. Nothing is more discouraging than seeing a garden that was blissfully beautiful in May be overtaken by grass and weeds by the end of June. Mulch is your friend. Layer it on thickly before the weeds have a chance to get started and then hope that high winds and torrential rainfall don't carry the mulch away. Gardening here is wonderful, but it is not for sissies. (grin) Dawn

Today was the day for 2 baby owlettes to leave the tree nest in my backyard. This is the same tree that has been used by the owls in the years before but what I found to be remarkable was that the owlettes left on 5/9 of last year and that's today's date of this batch of babies leaving as well! Amazing!! This year's story..... I only thought there was one owlette in the nest because I had only seen one little head peeking at me from time to time. When I got home from the grocery earlier today my neighbor ran to my door to tell me that a baby owlette was in their back yard and had been sitting there for quite awhile. They didn't know what to do and quite frankly I was hoping for all that I was worth that it wasn't the owl from my backyard because it was going the wrong way!!! I have acres of woodland behind my house and this little fella was going toward more houses. Wrong way! When I got to the neighbor's house I quickly realized that it was indeed the little owlette from my backyard. I looked for quite awhile but didn't see the parents and they surely would have shown themselves had they known where this little guy was with us being so near him. We decided to move him back towards the nesting tree at the forest edge because I felt it would definitely be a safer place. I got a cardboard box and was able to easily scoop him into it (I got to touch him and he was wonderful!). I got him into my backyard and placed him on the ground. He hopped only a couple of inches away but turned back towards me and just sat. I sat with him for a few minutes and I made some of my mama owl sounds (yeah, right... lol) but for whatever reason he actually was making sounds back with me. Truly wonderful. Still no sight of mom or dad yet. I'm worried. I left him and went to sit on my deck. He came towards my house instead of going towards the woods. He climbed a tree near my deck but fell when he was about 10 feet up. Then he hopped across the yard back towards the woods. Yaaaay! Then I finally saw Dad!!! He came and sat in the tree next to the deck and I'm pretty sure he was gonna make sure I didn't go near the little one again. Later in the day the little one finally climbed a tree and stayed. Mom & Dad were near. Still later in the day I was watching them all and saw movement near the other little one. YES!!!!.... it was a second owlette climbing the nearby tree!!! There were two of them! Yaaay! They both climbed.... and they both fell out of their trees. As it was getting dark I couldn't watch them any longer but I knew they were together as was Mom & Dad. And now.... here's pics of this year's (2008) baby owlettes! What a wonderful day!!! Judy

some ideas based on zones 7 - 10 plantings

Link two was the same photo as link one. Third link went to page not found and forth link was just a Houzz search page. The links do not look correctly done. One foot width is so narrow you might be best off building a tall trellis and planting an evergreen vine. Those below look custom built, but you can buy 4x8 ft trellis panels and sandwich them between upright posts for a similar look. While there are some tall, narrow shrubs that might work such as Cupressus sempervirens "Stricta" or Juniperus virginiana "Skyrocket", most will eventually get 2 to 3 ft wide and will take years to grow tall enough to begin to give any privacy.