Do it right.

A stitch in time saves nine.

This isn't the best year to be putting in a new landscape anyway. I speak from experience. Providing enough water isn't the only issue. It's just been too hot for plants to establish well, if at all. Predictions say we're in for another exceptionally cold winter.

You might think you are getting a year a head by putting them in now, but in this climate, you'll be doing yourself a big favor by doing it right.

Do it right, and give yourself a fighting chance.

Seedmama

I'd say wait on the trees and bushes. I think with the weather we are having, it would be a miracle to get them established.

Going from stress to winter does not sound like a good plan.

I lost 3 plum trees this yr. they had very little root structure. Combined with the heat and drought, they did'nt have a chance. They just did'nt have enough roots to survive.

You could plant a green manure cover crop this fall after you get the beds done the way you want them. That would both improve the soil and give you something to look at besides bare dirt. Then you could just cultivate it into the soil when you plant your veggies this spring.

I agree with Paula. Do it right at the beginning, as I suspect you've already decided to do. Not only is the climate outlook for next year very iffy, but you don't want to invest money in trees and shrubs and then find out that your soil is not going to behave properly without the amendment.

I actually have a large (1800 sq ft) flower bed that I began planting before doing any sort of soil analysis or amendment. It looked pretty good, and I'd been sick for a long time, so my brain wasn't firing on all cylinders. Now, 4 years later, I'm shocked by the result of the soil analysis. I find that it's in desperate need of help and will have to be heavily top-dressed to correct it. There's no way to move the big stuff that's in there. What was I thinking?! Apparently I wasn't. My veggie garden can be mulched and tilled and amended properly. The big flower bed cannot.

I was going to invest in a couple of pecan trees this fall, but now I'll hold off another year until I have a better idea of whether the climate is going to return to normal or not. We lost six young planted trees this year, not counting the small perennials that gave up. A pecan, several peach, and a maple, and a half-dozen more in big pots, all curled up and died. Another 6 year old maple is definitely unhappy. Nearly all the perennials I started from seed promptly died as soon as they were set out into the garden. By May it was too hot for anything but the strongest established plants to survive. I don't want to lose anything else due to lack of advance planning if it's avoidable. My budget can't stand the strain of buying replacements and it's very wearing on my disposition as well. You know?

You have enough experience to know that the prep work is all-important. I think you'd be sick if you invested in the permanent stuff first and then lost it all to bizarre weather and disagreeable soil.

Pat

I think some of the best advice I have heard.

Build your house on a firm foundation.

Plant a $5.00 plant in a $20.00 hole.

Do it right the first time.

Thanks, folks. That's the way I was leanin'. Thanks for pulling me off the ledge!

...but I really, *really* wanted to plant something. I've spent the last five months totin' and diggin' and running string lines and string levels...and diggin' and totin' some more....and driving stakes and diggin' and totin' some more.

The last time I grew anything green was almost a year ago!

otoh, if I do it right, by this time next year, I'll have all of the beds ready to go and mulched, the rest of the edging will be in and I'll have the pea gravel in the walkways.

I agree w/ everyone. I was going to plant fruit trees and bushes this fall too, but I have decided to hold off at least one more year. I think the up coming winter and next summer are more an issue then the mulch. (not saying the mulch isn't important, I just think w/ or w/o mulch new unestablished trees aren't going to stand a chance this coming year)

Besides if you do the veggie garden that is instant results the season you plant you will see results from your investment, but the trees would be defered success, and you said your yard is bare, so if you have a more immediate success it will encourage you to keep going.

I don't know where you are, what your native soil is like or what your expected rainfall is like, so I can only say what I would do. Here in eastern OK, trees and shrubs take hold even in terrible years. And if planted in the fall, mulched well and watered well the next summer, there is a good chance they will take hold and live. So this fall I will be ordering and planting young bare root trees and shrubs in native soil and hoping for the best. That said, we may have lost the bare root English Walnut that I ordered and planted in March of this spring, despite watering regularly. The blister beetles found it and ate all the leaves off it overnight. It put a few back out but they shriveled up when it hit 111 F. Last fall's bare root fruit trees though have done well, grew a lot in the spring (24" of rain in April and May) and being mulched heavily and watered regularly all summer are looking good now that they got another 6" of rain in 8 days.

But if you don't have our conditions you may be ahead in the long run to wait a year as hard as that is. Do remember though that hardwood trees and shrubs don't need the same heavily amended soil as vegetables. The critical thing is to get rid of competition. No grass or weeds growing under them and mulch heavily, but not too close to the trunk. Your earthworms will take the nutrients down. One thing to avoid in clay soils when planting hardwood trees and shrubs is creating a "bucket" of amended soil only a little larger than the root ball. This once recommended practice has been found to be detrimental, as it can hold too much water and drown the roots if in heavy clay. It also prevents the roots from getting out away from that area. It is better to dig a large hole, refill with native soil and put compost and mulch on top.

Whatever you do, good luck with it.

About the only things I'll be doing this fall is taking care of what can be amended. Got the small flower bed covered with paper and about 5" of grass clippings yesterday and it will sit like that all winter, except for the addition of more mulch as necessary.

Lined up a delivery of some freebie composted horse manure/shavings and hope to get at least 2 pick-up loads of it to dump in the veggie garden along with the compost from the property. Other than that, everything is going to sit until spring and see what the conditions are by then.

I keep eyeing the new catalogs and making notes of stuff I want to put in, and needing to exercise considerable restraint because I know that now would be a huge mistake. I did order two of the HF drip irrigation kits that Chandra posted in another thread. The price was too good to pass up. The hose alone would cost nearly double the price they're offering.

Pat

My tree beds are dug about ten to twelve inches deep, six feet in diameter mEighty lbs of compost is mixed into three of them, with about a hundred fifty lbs mixed in the other two. Next month, I'm going to rake in some topsoil on yop of all five tree beds.

Everything but the raised beds will be mulched by next spring, cost and materials availability permitting, of coure.

The only thing that won't be done by this time next year, is to build the boxes around the raised beds. That was a project for the third year, anyway.

I'm in Duncan, btw. Hard clay and next to no organic material in it when I started.

Do it right, with caveats. This winter, order lots of bareroot trees from the state. They are cheap, native trees and will do well with minimal fuss in native soil.
Look around for people who want trees moved. I got literally hundreds of mature trees this way when we lived near Medicine Park. Went from a bare, ugly weedy hill to a beautiful, tree filled pasture in less than two years. Each tree cost about $200 to move, depending on mileage. I found lots of people have large trees in the wrong place and are unwilling to pay a tree mover to move them moving these mature trees requires no soil amendments, since the entire root ball is moved and the tree undergoes almost no transplant stress. I didn't lose a single tree this way and they required very little extra water. Move in the winter, of course, with a tree mover. ( you can find these in the yellow pages or online)
Mounds- when we built our house, they had to do some dirt moving and dug a foundation. I asked them to make berms and mounds where I would eventually put my landscape trees ( not the big ones that I had moved, the went in regular, flat dirt). I piled horse manure on top of the mounds and let that age for many months. I then started planting all the bare root trees and fruit trees on the mounds. These trees also did great, despite suffering through a drought in 1998 and 2005.

Make the investment.

The last time we looked this bad, I took everything out in fall and did exactly what you are describing. Worked only on the dirt, lots of sand, spent some money, hired haulers and dump trucks. It is the best thing we ever did. That and installing big lights on top of our house so I can garden at night. We stripped it bare and put in deep good dirt and sand you can dig into with just a hand trowel. No organic matter. Just good top soil we had trucked in. Sand is cheap, a whole load truck load cost about the same as a few bags of play sand. We chose gravel as mulch and I won't ever have to buy mulch again. We found a good deal way east of the city. Hired a guy from classified ads, who had a Cat and to help spread it around.

This initial investment has paid off one hundred fold. I would never again attempt to garden any other way unless I lived up around Pond Creek or Lamont where they have that great deep sandy soil. My sister lived there and could grow anything well.

There is nothing like starting from scratch, clean, with a big area of good deep dirt and blank space. You can actually plan and just go out and easily plant in the ground with 99% success. Watering becomes easy as it just soaks right in, deep. Gravel keeps it moist and neat looking. Like snow in winter.

I do not agree with some of the comments concerning the impossibility of establishing new plants at all now. In good dirt you certainly can. I know, I have done it. I have been planting all summer with good results if I give a new plant a daily drink for the first two or three weeks and choose one that is tough to begin with. I have even moved a couple of plants successfully this summer.

I made this decision concerning which plants to grow initially: If its not native, its not going in my landscape. If its a water loving plant its not going in except where the air conditioner drains making it too wet to grow anything else. When the entire area is planted in tough, drought hardy natives, a consistent look begins to develop and I like it so much better. The challenge is finding a source. Its also the fun.

Watering has been a once a week or less necessity per plant this summer and many have had none except for rain. I am now so completely bored with typical landscape plants that I don't give them a second look or consideration. I go for the toughest SW plants I can find and most are from seed I had to order or trades here on GW from people in Texas. Nursery's don't offer most of what I grow. It took only two years to come around and every year it gets better and better. The plants establish very quickly in this good deep soil and end up larger than anything I ever grew in my previous heavy clay soil, which was always a struggle to keep watered and my plants looked like crap. I am growing a few of the same ones (herbs) and the difference is obvious.

I found myself liking the clean empty space between plants and I no longer over-plant, buy on impulse or go for a lush look. A look I no longer like anyway. Each plant now holds its own spot, is shown in the best way for itself, instead of the over planted, wilting mess I once had to look at every summer in dirt that no matter how often I watered, it made no difference.

I have very little bright green. The colors in my garden are mostly sagey now. I have no wilting during the day and have had very little loss this summer. These plants are thriving. I've lost just a couple of plants and those were ones I started from seed so its no big loss. Everything else looks just fine. The rule here is survival of the fittest. I like experimenting to see what works and what doesn't. If it doesn't, I just go on and try something else.

Thanks, folks.

Good info from all of you.

The front garden is a bit smaller than what some of you are working with. I'm also working on a fairly tight budget. I've only spent eight hundred bucks, so far, with plans to spend another fourteen hundred by next June. My major plantings will cost me approximately five hundred bucks in the fall of 2012. otoh, when I'm finished, I'll have a landscape that not only looks good but will help to feed us, cutting our grocery bill between one third and one half, at full production.

In the design, I have made a few concesions to drought conditions by designing a central walkway that will catch ad hold run-off, with the entire garden draining towards tht walkway. Every bed except for the raised beds will be heavily mulched. With as much work as I;ve already done, the soil is alrady holding wate, when water ran off, before. After I ad compost, topsoil ad other materials, it should hold the moisture quite well, without allowing exces moisture to be stored in the sand and pea gravel walkway or reasily drain away.

The plants will be allowed to more or less maintain their natural shapes, while the overall design is based on a formal, partition garden.

Pictures are linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful:

Thats a tight budget? I guess all things are relative in this life.

Yeah CG, that's a tight budget. We've got enough left over to pay the bills and eat and have a couple of Andrew Jackson's left at the end of the month. Except for taking Oct. Nov. and Dec. to get ready for the holidays, that's the way it's gonna be until next June.

Once the landscape starts producing fruit and veggies, the ROI will be around two to three years...and I'll never havta do it again. Plus, after the first two or three years, it's all free groceries and trade goods.

Well, it sounds like you already had it all planned to the last detail and worked out. It wasn't a matter of getting suggestions, it was more of a statement of fact to get yourself geared up. Good luck to you.