Reason your patio looks like an "eyesore" is there are no plants around it, it's just there. A low hedge or just a couple of attractive shrubs on the end that is narrow-to the left in the pic. If that doesn't appeal to you some flowers along the house with place to step off the patio to go around that side of house with couple of shrubs more toward corner of the patio, idea is to make it like a room, right now it is missing the "walls" so few plants could give illusion of walls, maybe repeat with 2 shrubs on side toward swing set but don't block the swingset off want to be able to see your kids. Lower shrubs or grasses to anchor that corner & make it seem more like a room. If your wife gets shock type allergy symptoms you might do well to get an electric bug zapper out there or she should put repellent on before going out. Decks are lot of work & expense & need to be redone every few years. You just need to "dress" the patio you have! It's like a bedroom with nothing but the bed in it. Needs some furnishings (plants) to finish the look. Good Luck!

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

gumby's right -- the raccoons aren't interested in the plants, they're interested in the bugs and worms, and they dig like dogs (or wild pigs!) trying to get to them. The plant roots get injured, and sometimes they're uprooted entirely, but it's all collateral damage to the bandits. Make it impossible to dig, and they move on. I'd only be doing this for summer crops or perennials, the majority of which fruit above ground level. I'll probably put the wire a few inches above the sweet potatoes, so that I can chop the vines off, remove the wire, and then dig the roots when the time comes. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, cucumbers, squash, none of those need to come out of the ground until I change over for the season, at which point I can pull the wire back. Garlic and onions are out by May or June, which is when the hooligans come around. So in theory, it should work... it's good to hear that others have had some success with it. My raised beds are full of compost or imported soil, and they're about 2' high with wooden sides, so I get very few weeds... it should be easy to pull them before they're so big they get their roots into the wire. Thanks for the comments. :) --Sam

Can you ask some local experts to suggest a specimen evergreen tree that will be happy and fit right behind your deck? It will be nice to look at from your family room and bedroom and offer a little sense of privacy on the deck. Get the biggest (oldest) you can afford, THEN have the new fence put in. That way the nursery can use heavy equipment to plant it.