Peter- Wow. Sounds like you're getting into my head. Had some questions a while back about whether people only tended/tilled their rows, or tended/tilled their entire garden. I was thinking that it could be more cost/labor effective if you only tended rows year after year and let the aisles kind of be... with some sort of cover crop. Sounds like it can be done. I'm very interested in that. Is the white clover you mention, "dutch white clover"? When it creeps, will I be able to bring it under control when I till as normal for my fall/winter garden, and my spring/summer garden, or will I need to do additional spading/ edging of some sort then, and throughout the growing season? Can I plant it now, along with my winter garden? The book sounds interesting. I'm going to pick up a copy. Thanks for the clarification on the fact that, yes, I can grow hairy vetch and cereal rye now and still have organic matter to till in, in the early spring. Great news for me. I'm being thick headed here, but I'm still not understanding how the cereal rye affects seeds/seedlings. You say "cereal rye will suppress small seeded vegetables, but will not kill healthy transplants". Do you mean that ANY healthy transplant will not be harmed, and that only small seeds sown in place may have issues? Or do you mean by "small seeded vegetables", even transplants that are grown from small seeds can be affected? No till eh? I might be interested and your experiment suggestion is certainly something I'd be interested in trying. Do you think that even with the poor soil conditions that I have currently, it would be worth experimenting with that right now? Or, as I'm thinking maybe better to bring up my organic matter by tilling in pine bark fines, bring up my potassium levels with sulfate of potash (currently very low), add alfalfa meal to supply nitrogen needs, plant the garden, mulch with either shredded leaves or straw or hay.... Then next season try the no till part of the equation? Frankly, I'm just a little unsure about how the whole no till thing is going to work for me. Don't know a whole lot about it, but kind of thinking it might be better to do "next phase" because my soil is so poor. Please feel free to argue this to me, offer suggestions for no till on poor soil conditions viability. Do you (or anyone reading this) have a good source for cover crop seed? I was going to purchase from Johnny's selected seeds, but they are out of some of the varieties I was interested in.

Whatever you do...do NOT add potting soil or a little fence around the tree. Trees do not like water or dirt around their trunk. Check to make sure no one ever did this in the past. Planting around the tree is tricky...if you aren't careful you could damage the roots. Most spring ephemerals (daffodils, Virginia blue bells, Trillium) should be fine. Does the driveway drain properly? If water puddles round the tree you could add storm drains or french drains...although once again, you have to do this without hurting the tree's roots. You could remove a section of driveway to give the tree's roots more room to spread.

NH Babs my little drawing i did is by no means to scale. I doubt the walk way on the left will probably be no wider than 36-40”. I originally told the landscape architect to put the walk way against the house leaving larger planting beds against the black aluminium fencing we will have and he balked at that idea. He said it would look much nicer to have a bed on either side. He said the exposed concreted crawl space foundation will look nicer with shrubs in front of it. When he explained it that way it made sense to us. He proposed doing three free standing trellis features with a climbing flower vine on each. and tidy boxwood hedge in between those. There are only three small windows on that side of the house on the bottom level. so it’s mainly just a large expanse of siding. This was all verbal of course. We haven’t gotten any plans back from him yet. This is why I’m here though. Trying to get as much feed back and info as we can so we can be prepared and educated on plants and ideas as to work on this until we get it right. Our last home the architect drew it up based on what we said. We signed off and in the end we were never quite happy with what we got in comparison to the vision in my head. However i can’t blame them as we were not educated enough and prepared enough to make different suggestions or push back when we didn’t agree with them. We had a large lot with a whole lot of plants that made no sense. A huge amount of stamped concrete and we only used a small portion of it etc. We spent a ridiculous amount of money on something that we could never really bring to fruition. Hoping with a lot of research to avoid that this time around!

wouldn't recommend three in one hole. If you want a tree/s that will be small and no/low maintenance or spray try girardi mulberry, Chicago hardy fig, or North Star sour cherry