My land was planted pine forest. I had 35-40 acres (of my 88 acres total) timbered out leaving hardwoods and some scattered pines. I drove from Florida to the Virginia/West Virginia border and purchased a stumpgrinder that fits the 3-point hitch of my 28hp New Holland tractor. I spent the next 1 1/2 years going down the rows of planted pines, 450 trees/acre, grinding out stumps along the way. We burned the debris remaining, attempting to level the fields as I went. That didn't work as well as I wanted but, time wasn't our friend then. About 1/2 was cleared enough for horse pastures, hay production, etc, leaving the rest for future projects a couple of U-Pick muscadine grapes, blueberries, blackberries, etc. I took soil samples down to the Ag station and had them analyzed, then raised the pH a bit and added fertilizer recommended by the station manager. When I downsized my horses from 8 to 4, I turned my stallion's small pasture into an area for growing veggies.
That transformation began with letting the manure age and cutting all the vegetation really short. I ordered a huge dump truck load of mushroom compost from the local mushroom farm, spread it out onto the projected daylily bed, the 4 ft wide stripes for food production, then put the rototiller on the back of the tractor and rototilled all the manure, compost, and vegetation into a fine soil. We did pull out any vegetation that remained. In the daylily garden, I planted the daylilies, placed several folded pages of black and white newsprint between the plants topping it off with a few inches of pine chip mulch. For the veggie garden, it was a similar process, but I lined the rototilled stripes with good landscape fabric before planting the veggies, then mulching. In both of these cases, water was sent out by rainbirds.
This time for the new daylily garden, more mushroom compost was rototilled in. Believe me, it is worth its weight in gold to rent or pay someone with the equipment to do the spreading of compost and recommended additives to the soil. Unless you are doing hundreds of acres, a couple of acres can be worked in a day or two without breaking your back. Then level it a bit with a rake, roll out your landscape fabric (use the better stuff), put in your alfalfa pellets and whatever distinct fertilizer (e.g., Osmocote) with your plants. This time to keep a lot of moisture off the leaves, we are rolling out irrigation tubing down the center of the 4 ft stripes with smaller tubing with 1 or 1/2 gallon per hour metering nozzles going to each plant. We figure that keeping so much water off the leaves may help with rust. We still get enough rain in Florida to wash the plants off on a regular basis. After the irrigation tubing is finished - connected to the timers, we will be covering the landscape fabric with 3 or 4 inches of mulch. Because we still have a fair number of pines, we thought we would use pine needles (unless someone here says, "Good Lord, don't do that with daylilies - xxx is better!".
This is the project we are currently working on now, so I don't have a final outcome of how this will really work - but it seems like a good plan. I know that using a good, thick landscape fabric and the mulch will prevent light getting to any remaining seeds in the soil which will cut down on weeding. Eventually, I wouldn't mind taking that soil and elevating it up a couple of feet, in lined concrete raised beds, that will keep me from bending over quite so much. I knew what I wanted to end up with and cut down on intense labor, reliance on memory (did I water those plants?) to get a fairly easy-to-care-for garden.
Hope this helps!
