Time for gardening?

I'm a very new gardener. This past spring was my first big gardening adventure. Now that I'm into all the research about it, I'm finding out that fall is an important time for preparing beds for spring. What great info to find! My big challenge is...... where?? If you could see my backyard, you might think the same thing. Off the back of the house is a big deck, roomy and it should have potential. Then the yard. UGH. Two years ago we had a precious family member help us get rid of tons of overgrown plants and trees. It just looked like such a huge mess, not to mention the chiggar infestation was so bad we couldn't go out there! After taking out so much we still have 30 trees back there. The yard is so shaded that I couldn't get my vegetable garden to grow, and I still fight mosquitos that seem to think I'm dessert. Where do I start, I wonder? Take out more trees? Seems like a waste though.

After trying to envision my dream garden, I feel confident to get started. The big bushy plants, which I think are gardenias, will look nice in the front yard. I need to transplant those this weekend. That's at least a starting place! Then I'll decide which trees deserve to stay, and which ones I could actually remove. Several are just too large to remove, but the smaller ones might be moved or taken out. I need to research what to do about all those mosquitos! We live in East Texas, and I don't know if it's even possible to get rid of them.

OOooh, I found the book "The Way We Garden Now" at the library, and it's going on my wishlist. Awesome info. that's totally on my level. I can't wait to get started.