Put the fruit trees to the north so they won't shade the veggie beds.

I'm in New Zealand, with rather different conditions from yours, so I won't try to offer you much potentially useless advice.
But...unless you have cool, damp summers and/or a disability where raised beds would make gardening possible, I recommend you carefully weigh up the pros the cons of raised beds.
They can be a real pain to keep moist.
I'm all for 'edges' around the beds. My ex-raised beds have nice deep edges, perfect for holding in compost and mulch!

The land can be sloping but the beds will be flat, so I do not think you have a problem. Make your beds with high edges but just enough cardboard and compost to smother the grass and grow crops. They will be able to accept mulch for a long time. Some of my beds already have 8 inches of composted mulch and I have to dig it out and take it somewhere else.

The fence is a great asset to have. Dig under it and put down something like chainlink fence, one foot long, extending outward (replace sod on top of chainlink). That will eliminate diggers. Place an electric wire at the top (there are wire holders that will clamp onto chainlink). That will eliminate climbers and strongly discourage deer.

I agree that fruit trees go North, and if the fence is electrified, squirrels will not be able to climb up (this is a great advantage), assuming there are no nearby trees from where to jump. Their roots will extend at least 15 feet into the garden, and that area will give you less than optimal crops. You will not be able to till and roots will show up in beds.

Choose your trees according to seasonal coverage and ease of spraying. Not sure how cherries do there, but apple and plums have similar spraying schedule, so you could choose early and late plums, early and late apples, and cover your season from July to November. In fact, I'd get only apples, include a number of keepers, such as Arkansas Black or Gold Rush, minimize my spraying chores, and cover my season from September to April.

With apples, make sure you have two varieties that bloom at the same time and will pollinate each other. It can be rather tricky choosing varieties.

IIRC, cherries are self-pollinating (certainly the ones I grow are). I don't know about plums.

So do you think I should fill in the pool area with dirt and then put my raised beds on top of that? or should I just support that wall of dirt with the retaining wall and set my beds on that sand that the pool was on? My main worry is the water coming off that retaining wall and just sitting in that flat spot where the beds are. Worry or no worry?

Another option I have considered is just sloping the wall down and not making it a retaining wall. Just blending it in. I'm kinda leaning towards this option now.

I was planning on using 2x12s to make my 4x8 beds. The soil here is your typical red clay. Not very high quality soil which is my reasoning for going to raised beds.

Regarding the tree roots, should I just not plant fruit trees in the same area as the garden? It would be nice to have them in the fenced area like glib said. What kind of spacing is optimal for fruit trees?

No matter how you go, I think you are going to want that pool area filled in.

I would first spray all the grass and such with Round up. Kill everything out.

Till the entire area as deeply as you can.

Once it is all loosened, rake the whole area out smooth, and lay out your beds and paths with pegs and string.

It helps to draw the entire area on graph paper to scale. Then you can draw and re-draw your beds until you have them arranged just the way you want.

Make your paths 3 feet wide. Make your beds no more than 4 feet wide: narrower, if you are short. The idea is to be able to always stand in the paths and reach into the bed without ever walking on that soil.

Mulch the paths, starting with cardboard or thick layers of newspaper, topping them off with straw, bark, or whatever. Do this first, so you can have a somewhat clean place to walk.

And walking will help pack them down faster. (When I built my garden, I laid long narrow pieces of panelling over the paths. This helped distribute my weight over the area and the paths packed down smoothly.)

THEN install your bed edgings and fill the beds with good stuff: compost, manure, organic mix, any, all, or any combination thereof.

The advantage to this is you don't waste good bed filler in your paths, you get that sand spread throughout the area, and the native soil under your raised beds is loose enough that plants can reach down into it over time.

It will be a big project. It will be totally worth it.

I built a similar sized garden on a hillside that had lots of trees and shrubs in it. So I began with relocating all those plants. (Waste not. Want not.) The entire project took about two months, working 2 or 3 hours a day, 4 to 5 days a week. The pictures in the link were taken last year, year two.

I absolutely envy you the fence. Maybe you could plant dwarf fruit trees on the north side? Put as much path distance between the beds and the trees as you can.

Here is a link that might be useful: My garden

Yes, I am sorry that I skirted your main question. The pool area will need to be filled, for sure, but the gentle slope of the land is not a problem. Do not fill with more sand, though. You may choose to fill with wood chips, which are free, and would eventually give you great topsoil depth at that location.

If the soil is red clay, yes, raised beds are recommended. And despite what I said, you want to keep the trees inside the (electrified!) fence, unless you have no squirrels.
If the fence is not electrified, it will do nothing to the squirrels. Just remember that you will be unable to till within 15 feet or so, once the trees mature. In fact, if you make beds, it should be easy to do no-till agriculture. I actually have productive beds right on top of the roots of four trees, I just add organic matter on top every two years, and water well.

The tree size depends on your choices. Cherry are big, period. Plums are generally smallish, 20-25 ft. Apples, even if you get semi-dwarf rootstock, will easily get to 25 ft.

Donna/Gilb thanks for taking the time to respond! I've got some fill dirt left over from another project so I think I will fill in with it. It has some rocks in it but the big ones are easily picked out and the smaller ones come out easy with a rake. It isn't high quality dirt by any means but I think I will favor my beds towards the south and east sides of the area.

Putting the beds on the south side should give me plenty of room to have as many beds as I want and give the trees plenty of room as well. I would have probably 25 feet or so from the north fence to the beds.

Thoughts?

A few more questions:

What do you fill your beds with? Seems like some of the bulk companies sell a "rich mix" which is like 60-70% compost and the rest topsoil. They all recommend that for veggies.

Where is a good site to determine how much to plant? I'm looking for information such as I can get X number of tomatoes from one plant in a season.

I've read that only dwarf apple trees are recommended? Other dwarf trees such as pears can have issues with disease, etc.

Does anyone keep bees along with their garden? Bees were something I had been looking into and it just so happens a buddy at work has a bunch of bees and can help me get started. Did bees make a big difference for your garden/fruit trees?

Do you start veggies from seed or plants?

I appreciate all the help!

I recommend reading some gardening books. There are some excellent resources out there and most of them you'll probably find in your local library. You've got plenty of time before next Spring so research really should be your first priority at this point. They will have a lot of basic info about building your garden, starting seeds vs. transplants, companion planting etc. They will help you decide what to plant and when and where. Here is a list of some of the recent books I've read and would recommend you at least skim through them.

- Great Garden companions by Sally Jean Cunningham
- The No-Work Garden by Bob Flowerdew
- Rodales All-new encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
- Seed to Seed by Susan Ashworth

About the bees, if you just want bees to help pollinate, then planting companion flowers and herbs will help the bees find you. As your trees and other veggies blossom bees will come swarming in. Of course if you really want to invest in all the equipment to actually collect the honey then that would be up to you.

I envision this when I look at your pic: The garden around the inside perimeter, using the fence as support, with shorter plants in front of those. Maybe roses or other shrubs in the corners. A 4-5 foot stripe around the fence would be a huge garden, conducive to soaker hose watering.

That leaves the interior open for fruit trees which would make shade and you'd have a beautiful 360* view of everything, where you can put a little table and chairs, gazebo, or a couple benches, a bird bath or 2, maybe a water feature to attract toads who would repay the favor by eating tons of bugs... I agree with the above suggestion of having a few flowers here and there to be pretty for you, give you vase flowers, and attract pollinators.

Will using round up on the grass have any effect on my garden or trees? Do I really need to kill the grass? Can I just till it under? Physically remove the sod?

The grass will eventually invade the beds, unless your beds are very deep and very tall (avoiding both rhizomes and seeds). You could remove the sod, but then add gravel with plastic under it, or, less permanently, old carpet in the paths. It is best to have no weeds in the paths.

Your grass is bermuda? I would use the round- up unless you're really against using it. If you are against using it, you will be working very hard to kill it. Lots of cardboard and deep beds/mulch on pathways, after using a sod remover to remove the sod. I would not attempt to use a lasagna garden method of putting the sod back into the garden because you will essentially be planting bermuda in your garden.
As an example of how easy it is to plant Bermuda, when we wanted to get Bermuda established in a pasture, we would take little bits of roots and pieces of sod scraps, throw it in a manure spreader and spread it across the pasture in the springtime. Instant Bermuda!
Consider actually using your fruit trees for shade, since they are deciduous and you have brutal summers in OK. Maybe not for all of your raised beds but perhaps a few. This way, you can plant things that would appreciate a little summer shade, like tomatoes and peppers near the trees and other things like cowpeas and okra in full sun. I kind of like the idea of the trees in the middle with veggie beds around it for this reason. It will also extend your season for salad greens in the spring, having shade for your lettuce when the trees leaf out.
You could probably use that clay soil if you heavily amend it with organic matter. Okie red clay is very rich in nutrients, it just doesn't drain well. I'd be more concerned about nematodes in the sand. Perhaps, when you are leveling the higher area, you can use that soil to partially fill your beds, adding a bunch of compost for the remainder?
I like the idea of deeply tilling. That will greatly help everything.
You might consider some peaches, too. I had dwarf peaches when I lived in the Lawton area. Full -sized ones ( very old trees that were established before I moved there) on a house I bought in Hominy. They gave me huge crops every year. There is a bit of maintenance with them, particularly thinning fruit, but having a pantry or freezer full of delicious peaches is so worth it. Pears also do very well in the south so I wouldn't discount them, either. Just research your varieties. Someone on the OK forum will probably know which varieties to plant.

Spray now to kill the Bermuda. Wait till it sprouts again. Spray again. Repeat this until you see no more Bermuda. It will take longer than you think, so begin now. When does Bermuda normally go dormant in your area? You have to get it all killed before then -- or wait till it sprouts next spring and continue the spraying.

Only after that can you build your beds and add soil.

[The alternative is to dig up the top few inches of the entire area and hand-sift it for Bermuda stems. I've done that successfully a couple of times, but it is extremely time-consuming and hard on the back, so I don't recommend it. In my area, I need to sift the top 4". That's a lot of dirt. Another alternative would be to remove the top layer, then replace it with Bermuda-free dirt.]

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I filled my beds with topsoil, then added soil from the compost area -- mostly for the earthworms. Probably the plants would have preferred a richer soil, but that's what they got: and they've done well enough.

Since you've got all that lovely chain-link, consider using it for trellises to support your tomatoes, cucumbers, pole beans, etc. You have free, heavy-duty, rustless supports that will never fall over! With slings for the heavier fruit, you can even plant cantaloupes, small pumpkins, and small and medium gourds. The disadvantage of building raised beds along the fences is that they can only be about 2' wide, or you won't be able to reach the plants except from the outside of the garden; this will double the cost of whatever you use to build the walls.

I am going to go get some round up today to spray the grass with. Will I need to rent a sod cutter to remove it or do you think I can just till it under? I'm not even sure if its Bermuda, but I know Bermuda is pretty darn resilient.

I'm going to fill in the pool area with the dirt I have left over from another project. I think I will try to mix in some organic material with it. I will till up the sand before I do it since the sand is compacted pretty well.

I'm going to purchase a topsoil/compost mixture to fill my beds. Is 12" a good enough height for raised beds or do they need to be 24"? And is a weed barrier on the bottom of them necessary? Or can that limit the growth of the veggies?

I also would like to grow some grapes. I have read that they need a lot of pruning. Would growing them on the west chain link fence be more trouble that building a dedicated trellis?

Take some of the grass to a garden center or your county's Cooperative Extension office; they can ID it for you.
OK Cooperative Extension Service offices

If you till Bermuda, you only make more Bermuda plants!

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Here are some pictures of the grass in the area. Any ideas on what it may be? I'm not too sure if it is Bermuda? Looks like there are some spots of crabgrass in there. This next week I will take some down to the coop's office.

Can I just smother the grass with newspaper and wood chips? Is straw an acceptable alternative to the wood chips in this process?

I can only say that some of the grass is definitely not Bermuda. There's some that might be.

Yes, you can kill grass with several sheets of newspaper and wood chips. The point of the wood chips is to hold down the newspaper; I don't know if straw would work. You're not really smothering it so much as depriving it of sunlight. [Bermuda will come back after three months of this; I haven't tried for a longer period.]

The disadvantage of wood chips is that while they're fine on top of the soil, and great if you let them decompose for 5 or so years (I have a daylily bed that was the Previous Owners' mulch pile), you don't want wood chips mixed into the soil -- sawdust either -- if you're growing veggies. Your veggies will be small and anemic, and you will need to add high-nitrogen fertilizer to reverse the problem. People argue about this, but I dumped a mixture of soil and the smallest parts of ground maple stump (sifted through a 1/4" screen) into a raised bed and planted pumpkins and radishes there -- and despite fertilizing, they'll never amount to much. (Pine bark mulch doesn't cause this problem, though.)

I agree that your first priority needs to be to get rid of the grass. If it runs, you don't want it. Period. You will also need to do some kind of edging around the outside perimeter of the fence that will prevent grass from coming back in. Absolutely don't till until you are certain the grass is dead. If you do it this fall, you won't need to worry about any serious residual effects of Roundup by next spring.

Although the fence would be an ideal place to trellis vegetables, the disadvantage is that you will not have a place to stand when harvesting. You would either need to make your perimeter beds narrow enough to reach across, or move them three feet inside the fence and erect trellises.

I don't know what I think about the trees in the center of the garden. You will simply need to track the sun and think about how much shade trees would cast on your beds once the trees are full grown. It's true that in the south most veggies appreciate some afternoon shade (mine does). That would mean plant your trees to the west of your beds, but again, you don't want that shade to hit them before about two o'clock in the afternoon. I have two dwarf apples in the Northwest and Southwest corners of my garden. They are only two years old, but I believe their shade will be welcome. Thanks glib, for the note about their roots and raised beds. I am glad to know that.

There are plenty of sites on the internet that will advise you on how much food to expect from a certain number of plants, but the truth is, you won't know for sure, until you have a couple of years under your belt. I can tell you that rather than growing lots and lots of one kind of food at once, I grow smaller amounts throughout the entire year (under floating row covers in the winter). My goal is to have plenty of fresh food for the table, and anything extra is canned or frozen. This works very well and I never have to face a bushel of anything at one time.

If you can find a company that sells a high quality "organic mix", that will likely be just fine for filling your beds. If you really want to hedge your bet, ask them for a sample of it now (about a cup full) and have it tested by your Agricultural extension office. In our town, that costs $5 and gives you a wealth of good information about what is in that soil. Regardless of what you use, you will want to start a compost pile and plan to add compost (and probably some fertilizer too) to each bed each year.

As it happens, my brother raises bees. Here is a link to his blog. He knows his stuff and there are lots of pictures. I'm jealous. My hubby draws the line at bees and chickens. :)

Good luck to you! Post some pictures later and let us see your results!

Here is a link that might be useful: The Door Garden

With regard to seeds versus transplants. I start from seed for these reasons. You can have access to far more varieties of any given plant if you start seeds. If you need say, half a dozen plants of a type, like tomatoes, starting from seed saves a fairly nice chunk of change (once you have a seed starting set-up paid for). I start twenty flats of vegetables and flowers about twice a year, so it's actually more than change... And, I just like working with seeds.

However, seed starting is time consuming and requires the right kind of equipment, not to mention knowledge. You can learn about anything you need to know from these forums or online, of course. But you do need a light set up or a greenhouse to really be successful at it. Seed starting is messy, so you want your set-up in an out of the way place. I have utility shelves set up in my basement with $10 shoplights from lowes suspended over each shelf by chains and S-hooks. This allows me to adjust the height of the lights as the plants grow. My basement is unfinished and has a drain in the floor, so I pull a hose inside each week through my short winter to water. If you have to haul water and mop up spills.... Every year, I ponder purchasing a green house so I can grow more than 20 flats. The bug has already bitten this year...but that's another story.

One of the most valuable things I ever read was in an English gardening book. The author said "every gardener must learn to think a season ahead." Amen to that. You must think about ordering seeds in early to mid winter. You must think to start seeds in late winter. Then you plant out in early spring. Come mid summer, it's time to start seeds for fall gardens (broccoli, collards, and the like). Did you remember to order fall garden seeds last winter? If you plant flowers too, there's more. Order bulbs in early summer. Remember to plant them in the fall....etc. It's really not that hard. It just takes the right mindset...and a good calendar doesn't hurt either.

I say all of that, to say this. If you are a full-time career woman with a family, especially young children, content yourself with transplants for a few years in the name of saving time. As time goes by, you'll know if you really love this. You'll gain experience and knowledge and then you will know when it's time to go deeper into this obsession (hobby).

I made some progress on the site today and got the pool deck torn apart and taken out of there so now I am pretty much ready to do something with the grass. I bought a bottle of concentrated Ortho total kill to use on the grass.

I'm a bit confused as to what I'm going to do with the grass after I kill it? Am I going to till it under after I kill it? Then lay down cardboard where I want my walking paths, set my beds where I want them, fill the beds with good soil/compost and then mulch the whole thing? Is straw a good choice? It seems way cheaper than wood mulch, considering that it is going to take 10 yards to cover the whole area with something 2 inches deep.

Is killing it a better option than removal with a sod cutter?

Thanks for answering all of these newbie questions ladies and gents. I am learning more everyday and have books on order to learn more :)

After the grass is dead, it doesn't matter what you do with it. You can till it under, rake it up and throw it in the compost pile, or simply leave it in place to decompose and enrich the soil.

The disadvantage of using a sod cutter is that you're removing what is probably the richest soil in that area.

Raising this thread from the dead! I finally got the pool hole filled in and starting to think about my plans for the area. I don't think I'm going to cover the whole area in mulch. I sprayed the grass, but its just going to take a ton of mulch. I think I will just mulch around the trees I plan to get.

I'm looking at getting 11 compspur & dwarf fruit trees for the area. The recommended spacing is 10' between trees so I should have sufficient space in my fenced area with 2 rows of 4 and a row of 3. I think 3 apple trees, 2 cherry, 2 pear, a peach, plum and nectarine tree are what I am going to choose.

I may forego the vegetable garden to focus my time on the trees. I haven't found too much about how to care for the trees such as what they need the first few months and how to prune them, etc. I assume it is a little bit different than large trees.

Anyone have any suggestions or tips?

There is enough literature on the web, with the information you need presented many times over, just not in the format you need. You will have to do some leg work. I doubt that you will be able to fit dwarf cherry trees in 10 feet, they will still grow to 18 feet or so, and I am unsure about the peach. You will need irrigation with dwarf trees.

You might do well to research cover crops or companions, too. 10' spacing will leave a lot of bare ground between trees, especially when they're newly planted. You could till a 3' strip, plant the trees there, then plant pumpkins to fill the open space. They would help reduce weed regrowth, and give you a fairly low-maintenance crop in the fall. Alfalfa and mustard are also popular to grow as beneficial crops in orchards.

Here is a link that might be useful: fruit pollination