After the current crops are out of the ground, heavy-duty soil improvement projects can be undertaken.
I think you'll get different classes of advice from "till people" and "no-till people". I think, for the first 2-3 years of improving clay soil, that mixing and tilling soil amendments in deeply (double digging or whatever) helps improve deep drainage and aeration rapidly.
"No-till people" will point out that patience plus worms plus compost gives good results.
Then there are the "Lasagna Gardening People". They don't till, neither do they double-dig, ever. But they do add compost, more compost, and even more compost, making them the smartest people. In effect, they create a huge compost heap 12-18" above grade and grow IN that. They can make a garden on top of concrete or solid granite.
Not all questions are very relevant to every situation, but some that might help us make suggestions useful to YOU are:
Raised bed or regular, ground-level bed?
Clay soil, sandy soil, or perfect soil?
"Light or heavy" soil? That is, is it fluffy and open and airy, or compressed and dense?
How fertile is it now? What was growing there before? I guess "not very fertile" or you wouldn't ask.
I would ask how "organic" the soil is, but if you have not been building it up, I would assume "low in organics"
Is there any slope to work with, or is your yard very level?
good drainage or weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth?
Can you do a lot of digging and wheelbarrowing? Buy soil amendments?
Can find free raw materials to make mulch and compost?
You said "Georgia". I assume "hot summer". Is that dry or wet? Should the soil try to grab and hold every drop of precious water, or is the problem trying to get it to drain away before plants drown?
If the soil is sandy or you don't get much rain, or city water is expensive, you want more water retention. Add compost and fine-textured water-holding stuff like bark fines, peat and coir.
If the soil is clay-ey, my condolences. Add lots of compost. And gritty stuff around the size of BBs (like 0.1 inch diameter). I dug mine out and moved it aside where I could screen it and amend it and let it "mellow" before putting back into my (very small) raised beds.
Screened "grit-sized" evergreen bark that is NOT all fines opens up the soil and (I think) binds some clay and takes it out of "the soup" or pudding that is clay soil. Crushed stone. Very coarse sand. #2 chicken grit. Turkey grit. But mainly compost, because it could take as much as 50% or even 70% sand and grit to balance the effect of even 30% to 50% clay. But compost seems to help even if you can only add 10-20% to the top 8 inches. More compost helps more.
(I used to wonder why compost helps almost every gardening problem, then realized that evolution or co-evolution probably made that true. Plants grow better if they drop leaves that improve the soil. Soil organisms thrive if they do things that make the plants above them thrive (they eat dead plant parts). Any community where plants and soil organisms DIDN'T benefit each other, could not compete with communities where they DID. So plants that drop poor compost-makin's tended to become extinct. Soil organisms that can't eat plant waste and thereby improve the soil, died when the plants above them died. That's just my theory, I don't claim anyone else believes it.)
Also, consider raised beds to improve drainage. if your 1,000 square feet are one big plot, like 50x20, see which way the slope goes and break it into multiple beds, like 20-foot raised beds each 5 feet wide, and ten of them. If you have enough cheap wood or concrete pavers, give them walls, otherwise just excavate a 2-foot wide walkway and throw that soil on top of the 3' wide raised bed. You'll have less growing area by (?) 40%, but deeper and better-drained root zones. Since now you'll only walk in the walkway, the raised soil won't compact.
For some reason, that raised-and-not-walked-on, improved-deep-soil was called a "French Intensive" style of gardening, or for a homebrew name, it's one aspect of "Square Foot Gardening". Also, the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod had a similar scheme for improving soil by making the rows twice as deep by hoeing or shoveling soil from the "walkways" onto the raised berms or rows.
And the area you need to amend is 40% smaller, so any compost, bark or grit you add can be 40% deeper.
But mainly, by being raised above grade, and well above the walkways, water will drain out quickly and roots can stop drowning and rotting after every rain.
But compost cures all ills. It helps clay bind together into peds or small clods so that there are air channels between the COLDS even if there is no air space between clay grains.
