First thing before planning the garden I called 811 and had the utility companies come out and mark all the gas, water, electric, phone, and cable lines.  It’s a free service and they just come out with a giant metal detector looking thing and a can of spray paint.  Since we’re planting fruiting trees I didn’t want to put them over any utility line.  Here’s the layout of our property with the utility lines marked.  The orange is phone, red is electric and yellow is the gas line.

Since the buried electric lines run on the south border of the property, we’re not going to plant anything there yet.  The biggest consideration for planting the garden is where the sun hits the yard since we want full sun for most of our crops.  The north 1/3 of our yard gets the most sun so that’s where we’ll plant all of our stuff this year.  We’ll put the fruiting trees along the north fence and the raised beds in the northwest corner.  We’ll also put some fruiting trees along the west side fence since we don’t have a land line (who uses their telephone lines nowadays anyways?)

The only problem is a pecan tree shading that area of the yard.  Time to break out the chainsaw…

Why do we want to spend our precious time turning our backyard into an mini farm?  The simple answer is this: we don’t want to buy fruit that was picked 3 weeks ago in a country thousands of miles away.  Merging the food chain and the supply chain is great for the global economy and makes sense for processed or frozen foods with a long shelf life…however everyone knows that with fruits and veggies fresh is best.  

We want to eat seasonally: peaches off the tree in June, pears in August, apples in September, and persimmons in November.  We want fresh non-GMO sweet corn.  We don’t want to pay $2 for a small bunch of organic cilantro.  We don’t want tomatoes that taste like chalk and were ripened with ethylene gas.  And most of all, we want to figure out how to grow all this in a suburban North Texas backyard when everyone else has a boring lawn.