Ben - Thanks for reporting back. It's always nice to see how projects have worked out! Your beds look great and the plants in them happy. A few suggestions: Put in edging between your grass and beds because if you don't, the grass will move into the wonderful soil in the beds you have created, and it's difficult to get out once established. You can cut a v shaped ditch that you renew once or twice a year; or get the heaviest duty black commercial edging and sink it to the rim so the grass hides it; or if you can find Trex type of stuff cut thin for edging. I've read that steel edging isn't kid friendly, and rocks won't do a good job of keeping the grass out. You might also want to make your beds about a foot wider to give your blueberries enough room to grow and a place to move your strawberries to when the blueberries start to shade them. (As it is you may have to prune the back side of the blueberries when they get larger to keep them from rubbing the fence.) Widening your beds needn't require the same difficulty in digging if you follow Diggingthedirt's suggestion: "You can start layering organic material in a swath - this is called the lasagne method and it works really well in areas where digging is difficult. You can search on garden web for more info about this system - just about everyone loves it and writes about their methods. The thick mulch of "stuff" - fresh (free) manure, used coffee grounds, newspapers, grass clippings, dry leaves, etc, will slowly break down, enriching the soil around your rocks and encouraging earthworms to loosen the soil for you. If you start creating this now, by next spring you'll have wonderful soil that will be much easier to dig." You can do this right over your grass if the bottom layer is a bunch of layers of newspaper or unwaxed corrugated cardboard. I'll add to the votes to swap out the pine tree for something that doesn't get so large so fast. Probably the most common mistake people make in planting is putting in plants without sufficient thought to how large the plant will ultimately be and then having to deal with the problems created further down the road. I figure you've got perhaps 10 years before it gets to the point that it's going to need a professional to get it out unless you have experience felling trees with a chain saw in tight quarters. I live in an area where white pine is native, and we have lots in our woods, and in the woods or as shade trees in our pasture I love them. At our previous house we had them near the house. They dropped pitch on the cars or whatever else was nearby, and dropped large branches when we had wet snow or heavy wind along with rain. In wet soils with heavy snow or rain and wind, the entire tree sometimes tips over, damaging whatever is in their path. When it's a 70 or 80 foot tree, that can be quite a bit of damage! It doesn't need to be removed this year or even next, but the longer you leave it, the more accustomed you will get to its screening affect, and the more you will miss it when you have to remove and replace it. (And realisically, it isn't a question of whether you will need to remove it, just a question of when and how expensive it will be; pruning the west side won't solve your problem.) Some research here on the conifers forum or the trees forum or at the American Conifer Society's website may give you some ideas more realisically sized for your site. Are you looking for year-round screening or just during warm weather? That will help determine whether you get a deciduous or evergreen replacement. You may be able to plant a replacement now several feet away, and not remove the white pine for a couple of years to let the replacement gain some size. Good luck and congratulations on a great start to your gardening. (Warning - it can be addictive!)

I did my undergrad research Thesis on Camassia quamash in the Willamette Valley several years ago. I studied many populations of quamash growing in pasture grass, and a few in places that could be considered 'lawns.' The camas comes up and blooms before the grass gets too long, so they appear to be fine as companians. As long as you can let your grass grow until late in the summer, I bet the Camas will do well. I would clear several inces of grass around each bulb when you plant to give it room to develop.

@whaaaa here's the issue with new construction, basements, and pavers: settling. When a builder backfills against the foundation, they just dump everything in there. It's really rare for them to compact the fill, which means you have a zone all around the house (typically at least 5 ft wide or so) that's prone to settling. That settling may continue for 7-10 years depending on local soils and what the backfill material is. So if I were building your patio, we'd propose two options. Option 1, we excavate until we hit undisturbed soil (typically even with the basement wall footer), backfill with 21a (aka crusher run/ABC stone) or flowable fill, and compact in lifts till we reach grade. Option 2, we move the patio so that it's not within that zone of settlement. I'm sure you're a nice person, but I don't want to see you every year or so to address settling. I'd rather just come over for a beer to admire what we did. You have a LOT of patio in that settlement area as drawn. You may also want to think about the fact that where the patio is right up against the wall in the "U" of the house, no one is going to spend much time there. In terms of human scale, we don't feel comfortable right up against a tall house wall like that. May as well either save some square footage of patio or slide it out a bit. Take your time to get the design and the order of operations right for your patio. I wouldn't freak out about turf damage. We just shuttled 40 tons of gravel into a backyard for a patio. Took 3 hours, and after we pulled up the plywood and fluffed the grass with a rake, it's like we magicked the stone in place.

For the record, I've successfully grown various plants in hard unamended clay as long as I watered properly (drip irrigation is good for letting water slowly percolate deeply into clay soil). You really want clay-tolerant plants if you want to see your planting bed thrive right away, but if you're patient, you can wait a season or two to build up your soil with lots of OM like compost and fast decaying wood chips. Plants I've successfully grown in plain clay dirt with no top soil are brugmansia (Angel Trumpet) and other plants that thrive in clay such as canna lilies, hibiscus, aster, Russian sage, wild bee balm, yarrow, geranium, roses, lots and lots of roses, etc. Rugged natives and tap rooted clay-tolerant plants can get deep enough to break down the texture of clay. There are many to choose from. Our clay soils are pretty mineral rich, just remember to a little nitrogen fertilizer. You can accomplish that through plain old shredded leaves from your yard and fast decomposing wood chips (they'll temporarily tie up the N but release it back later).