I'm excited for you! I have been slowly doing what you are just beginning. I am dissatisfied with my grape vives (birds and desease take all of the grapes) so I intend to pull them up and plant kiwis. I am in the north part of zone 7. I already have fuzzy kiwi and hardy kiwi. I also have asian pears, peach, plum, raspberry, blackberry, paw paw, jujube, persimmon, cherry, and figs. As you can see by my raised garden, I am trying to grow artichokes.

Pergola with fuzzy kiwi.

Beautiful Charlie! I am envious!

I'm still working on the layout of things. My yard is huge and can't or don't want to use it all up of course. So it's difficult to use just part of it and have it transition nicely with the unused part. There is next to no landscaping in this yard except a couple trees and a chain link fence.

I just recently learned something very exciting about fruit trees and that is that I can actually keep the height of my trees to my liking! I know, I'm easily amused, but that is awesome to me.

I am looking through seed catalogs which is fun, but I notice that they don't really inform a newbie like me too very well. Bottom line is that it will be trial and error until I get things figured out.

I've got snow on my compost pile, not sure if that's good, bad or indifferent. I guess it will break down eventually. My dogs got under my deck and ripped open the shredded leaves I had bagged under there. That was a lot of work and I was a little more than sore at them for sure.

It's all good though. I will be back with pictures after I get things placed in the right spot.

Organic: The snow won't hurt your compost pile. I once put fresh cow/horse manure on a compost pile and covered it with plastic to control the odor. We had an 18 inch snow and the compost pile was so hot it melted it as fast as it fell. Regarding fruit tree hight/space, I was once in Italy and I saw a guy who had prune his pear trees into a fence-type shape. Here is an example.

Here is my backyard organization.