It does not matter what order these products are applied. Mix them together if you wish. A couple ideas for you. Since this is the lawn forum, I assume you are trying to grow a lawn on the land described as "covered with oak trees". Realize that grass will not grow well in deep shade. Fine fescue blends containing Hard, Chewings and Creeping red have the best performance in moderate shade. Mulch you Autumn leaves into your lawn and allow them to decompose in place over winter. Excessive leaves should be piled and composted over winter and used as mulch in your beds or allowed to decompose further into leaf mold compost. Trees in the middle of your yard should have a mulch ring around them approximately the diameter of the drip line. Rake your shredded leaves into this mulch ring in the fall. Plant some shade loving flowers and ornamentals there. Hostas are good for shade. Good luck with your Michigan lawn. Bill Hill

Almost all plants in an Alpine garden needs a slope. Usually rocks are used to support the slope. Drainage is paramount, no matter how you achieve it. Adding sand to good loam or clay and you get stucco if you have no slope and it retains water. Free draining is the key. Build your berm as high as you are able. Some alpine plants prefer limestone based soil and some prefer acid. Some don't care what the ph is. I smear mud on rocks, plop some sedums on it, and walk away. You can arrange the rocks as in a rock outcropping, dump gravel between them , squeeze a few plant in, and watch things grow. An alpine garden does not need plants wall to wall. Mike This next picture isn't meant to look good, but to show how sedums and succulents can be grown in even the most adverse conditions. Here they are growing on wood and rocks with just a minimum amount of soil. Friends come by and add or subtract stuff all the time. I'm not in charge. lol Ignore the telephone booth. It's a joke. I'm still trying to find an appropriate place for it. Mike Here's another part of the garden that looks a little alpine. It needs a major makeover as I haven't touched it in about two years. Time constraints, you know. I have done nothing to the soil except give it a slope. It's good loam on the acid side. Mike...on vacation

Generally, a minimum of soil preparation is needed unless you have 'problem' soil. If the soil is very low in organic matter and/or excessively well drained, you should work some good compost or humus into the top few inches. If your soil is underlain by heavy clay, you will probably want to build up by adding amendments, rather than working into the clay layer. All the plants yo mention will benefit from mulching and from working more organic matter into the soil over time. I top-dress my woodland beds with a generous layer of finely-chopped leaves each fall.

I grow blueberries both in the ground in raised beds (5 plants in the ground for five years) and in sturdy black plastic plant containers (5 plants in 4 to 7 gallon containers)--that I picked up cheap from a local nursery. Two years ago, I harvested over four gallons of blueberries. Last summer the container plants were a bit of a bust as a late 90 plus heat wave after I'd cut the watering back resulted in the container plants having a very poor crop, but I still harvested nearly four gallons of berries from the plants in the raised beds. They are picked and put into gallon freezer bags and popped into the chest freezer. I don't even wash them, as I use no pesticides on them. I removed my clay soil in 2'x2'x15" deep sections and built the beds up to about six inches above ground level with a mix of 3 parts sphagnum peat moss, 1 part leaf compost my town produces, and 1 part of the clay topsoil. I reused the rest of the clay in another part of my garden. The container mix is simpler: 2 parts sphagnum peat, 1 part leaf compost. The beds have not needed additional soil or peat in five years. I mulch the beds with pine needles (not for the acidity as they don't actually contribute any, but for the fact they contain no weed seeds to speak of). I use bark mulch as a mulch in the containers--it stops squirrels from digging in them and weeds from growing. I use drip irrigation with city water at a pH of about 6.5 or so, and fertilize with Ammonium sulfate every spring, which also keeps the acidity level up. Fafard makes a sphagnum peat moss based acidic soil mix, so that's an option if you can get past the sphagnum peat moss issue. If you're only growing enough blueberries for you and your family, you are not really going to need a lot of the stuff. It's worth noting that for every person who thinks sphagnum peat moss is not a renewable resource, there's likely another who thinks the opposite is true. Here's what I know: In the US, our ubiquitous Canadian sphagnum peat moss comes from a country that has a lot of it and only harvests a small amount of it, and reseeds the harvested areas with ... sphagnum peat moss, which in the university greenhouse collection I help maintain grows quite quickly--I frequently have to cut it back to keep it from overwhelming our carnivorous plants that grow with it. In North American bogs, the moss grows several or more inches a year. The harvested bogs won't be replenished soon, but they aren't exactly turned into parking lots either. Then too, the harvesting process is not very carbon intensive in the scheme of things. You can read more about this perspective on the topic here: http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/other_comments/1780209/the_truth_about_peat_moss.html and here: https://garden.org/urbangardening/?page=august_peat