Are you asking about trees, shrubs or perennials? What's your vision? Native type landscape or a tropical paradise?

Start a compost heap now to get the activity back into your soil :-)

Paradise. I'm a disabled vet and gardening has become my daily thing. I've been sprouting just about everything I can find seeds for just for fun. I would like to transform this 5 acres into something interesting. Tired of scrub brush and thorns.

Well, I'd start with the area that you see from the house. Y'all can grow a lot of tropical stuff that I'd need to protect from winter cold. I think that papaya makes a lovely shrub. What have you started from seed?

And thank you sir, for your service.

I would start now with incorporating some compost into your soil and throw some worm castings and greensand in while you are at it. Their are worm eggs in the castings and I found a lot more worms in my garden after I added a bunch of castings. One could do a stint of green manure over the winter and then turn it in before doing a spring planting. That is a great way of getting organic matter into your soil.

Most of the garden perennials will do well being planted in fall. Some of the more tender salvias and marginal subtropicals will prefer a spring planting. They need to establish before the cold hits. There is planting them anyway , but knowing that you will have to protect them .

we live due south of houston but not quite on the gulf we have 4 acres, but 2 are covered in 36 live oak trees so i have about 1.5 acres left to garden in and that's plenty.... they say fall is the very best time to garden here i'm looking so forward to this gardening season we have solid gumbo here like pavement ......i've been building raised bed using raised bed "soil" i have new beds going in this week (dh actually has hired someone to build these for me) i'm 62 and have 2 new hips and 5 fused vertebrae hauling those bags are really hard for me, that was my first every Christmas in july present

but for you organic material are the key i've gardened in sand with added compost and other organic material added and it was wonderful...

enjoy every minute of your gardening ....