My Back-Yard Gardens

(If you haven't read the Planning the Garden page, go back and do that now. It describes the steps used to make this back-yard plan.)

Here's a small version of the empty PowerPoint™ diagram of my back yard. As you can see, the trees are entered in this diagram, but the annuals (see second diagram) are not.
For reference, west, the direction of the setting sun, is towards the top right of the diagram (over the chicken coop).
Click on the image for a full-sized version:

 

And here's a small version of the filled-in (and annotated) PowerPoint™ diagram of my back yard for the Spring of 2012.
Again, click on the image for a full-sized version:

In my particular case, the back yard has the advantage of being surrounded by a 6-foot wood privacy fence, with the pickets screwed, rather than nailed, to the braces. It has the disadvantage that it slopes - gently in some places, not so gently in others - down towards the creek behind my lot. That leads to another slight risk: in the 18 years I've lived here, the entire back yard has flooded twice from that creek's overflowing.

Because of the security of the back yard, in a pinch I would plant the crops that would be true staples, like potatoes and the Native Americans' "three sisters" - beans, corn, and squash. I already have pecan, avacado, and tangelo trees planted back there, and I have a couple of little olive trees in pots, patiently growing big enough to be planted there, too. (For what it's worth, you take them indoors if the temperature is going to get down close to freezing.)

The chicken coop is no longer used. Before I converted to a vegan diet, we kept chickens for eggs. We got our chickens from Boggy Creek Farm of Austin - we ran a retirement home for some of their superannuated hens. The fuzzy black lump in the raised bed is our cat, Sarah (RIP), who didn't like the chickens one bit.