Have you made a scale drawing of your property? The suggestion to make lists of the plants you have is a good one. If you know how to use Excel, you can do it on a spreadsheet, making it easy to sort by light requirements or height. Note the plants' ultimate size as well, to use in placing them on your plan. Once you have a drawing, you can pencil in the evergreens you have on hand, using near-mature sizes, to see how they might fit your lot. Maybe you could use the Leylands as a fast growing screen and remove them when some of the other, smaller ones, fill in a bit. They can also be trimmed into a hedge if you like. Group them together in one "bed" so that you don't have to mow or trim around individual trees. Staggering the placement a bit, rather than using a straight line, will give you a more relaxed look. Once you have your privacy screen planned on paper, you can decide where you want to put beds for the rest of the shrubs and flowers. They should be sited and placed for easy mowing, as well as for viewing from your living area. You may be able to incorporate them into the same beds as the screening plants, using them as a backdrop, if they won't block the sun. Beds will need trimming to keep the edge neat, and the lawn grass will try to creep into it, so you may want to think about some kind of physical barrier-type edging. A holding bed is always useful, especially for single plants. You can let them grow for a season or two until they're large enough to divide and plant in a larger clump in the beds. If you have multiples, or don't want a holding bed, go ahead and plant them in one bed and remove some to additional beds next year as they increase in size. Perennial and mixed borders are for tinkering, IMO, so plan on moving things around a lot as you discover that one is taller than expected, or another doesn't do well or you don't care for it, or whatever.

I really like the idea of just having a beautiful restful little dream about plants. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have tranquil dreams. Apparently my psyche is just not that chill. Now dreaming about buying a super expensive cutting or not being able to get an order perfect sounds right about my speed. I know I've woken up before feeling surprised that I didn't actually have Hoyas that I'd spent the whole night dealing with. Or this one morning, my dream had convinced me that everyone in the forum had gotten a kunming kina all on the same day. And then when I went online, the threads about it were missing! I quite frequently dream about dealing with mealybugs, and wake up feeling relieved that the warzone has evaporated. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with them - I've seen maybe 4 in my life. I just love the sweaters for Hoyas dream too. My Hoyas would be in such trouble if that's what they needed from me. It takes an average of 4 years for me to finish a scarf. I'd really love to try that dream tea, even if the result was that the mealyshepherds invented a giant Mechamealiezilla that breathed fire and knocked over plant shelves. Favorite quote from this thread: Anyone who has mealies crawling all over them needs to go. Indeed.

You don't need to cut the canes. Brambles (raspberries, blackberries, and any other rubus plant) can grow in clay. Yes, you did bury them too deep. But brambles are tough. You fixed that anyway. Do not put tomatoes or peppers outside until night temps are above 50F, you can but they need to slowly be exposed to colder temps. You can bury stems of tomatoes and peppers, so not a big deal there. No need to water unless dry. The spring is wet, I hardly water if at all. Tomatoes and peppers need to slowly be exposed to light. Often grown in greenhouses if you bought plants, so you need to take 2-3 weeks to slowly increase sun exposure before you put them in the ground. Complete shade the first couple of days then an hour of direct sun a couple days and increase to 3 hours, etc. Back to the brambles the fertilizer is fine don't worry about it. It should not have been added until established, but it should not kill them. It sounds like you're loving them to death, leave them alone! If your garden beds are wet a lot you may want to consider raised beds. Wetness will kill just about anything. If water is pooling on top and staying there more than 2 hours, it's too wet for garden plants. Building raised beds will work well to keep them drier, but will require more water in dry periods.

Thanks for the info. The slimy mud dried out mostly by the next day. When I stuck my finger a couple inches in the soil it just felt cool/damp but not wet so I'm assuming that means it's draining well? When I started the soil was dry like cement as you described. Now it's a more loose & workable. I live on a friend's property, they no longer have horses but do have llamas. She said their poop (which looks like lima beans) makes great fertilizer so I'll gently work some "Llama beans" into the soil in the next week or 2. Somebody pointed out that it sounded like I was "loving" the raspberries to death so I'm going to leave them alone for now and only water them every 2-3 days instead of daily. As far as the peppers go I had no idea about the frost thing. My friend planted her tomatoes the same time as I planted my peppers and her plants are growing no problem.... so maybe over watering is/was part of the problem too? I think I'll just dig up the dead plants and go buy a couple of new ones from Lowe's acclimate them over a whole week instead of only a day and then see how they do once planted. Luckily my strawberry & zucchini plants seem to be holding up ok so I guess that makes my garden only a 50% failure LOL