Those cedars may take a long time to compost!

Yup! That is why I'll let the city's composting program worry about them.
They do take any organic matter. ;-)

My father is also diabetic, I am aware of how careful you must be and the
degree of concern that it can generate. Your gardens will develop over
time, they should be a joy not a burden.

Quite right. I will take my time, and use it as an opportunity to educate
my neice and nephew; they may be too young to do the heavy digging, but
they're the right age to start learning about it.

Have you considered raised beds? We have a country property that is heavy
clay soil. We tried for years to grow flowers, usually with
disappointment.
Digging in that stuff is hard going. We finally had a truck dump a load
of
soil over the garden area (after covering it with wet newspaper to
suppress
the weeds). Now the plants grow well and I don't need to dig in the clay.

Actually, yes I have. But there is one big problem that has to be solved
first. My neighbor to the north has a dying maple just a couple metres from
the property line. Since it is dying, it is putting up suckers all over the
place: hundreds right from the base of the trunk, and it is imposible to go
a metre in the northern 5 metres of my property without finding yet another
sucker. I can't force him to remove the tree, but until he does, I don't
know how to get rid of the suckers it is producing on my property, short of
paving over it and putting a greenhouse on it (but it would take me a good
ten years to save enough to be able to pay for that). At least the tree is
leaning away from my property, and toward his house. I just hope he has
enough sense to remove it before it does serious damage to his house, or
maybe one of the residents.

This will require more patience than my orchids, since it will be a year or
two before I can do much with that part of the property, and I still have to
get rid of a "hedge" some genius tried to make using maples. What a sight
that makes! Imagine a straight line of the sickliest striplings you have
ever seen, planted an average of 15 cm apart! There are issues in the house
itself I have to address this year; not to mention my automated orchidarium
project for this summer. One thing at a time!

Growing orchids has many advantages over regular flower beds, no digging
and
no weeding to name two. However they seem to be some what addictive.

Quite right. And being in the house, I don't have to worry about pests. Or
perhaps I should rephrase that to mean that in the past I have never had a
problem with pests in the house.

Cheers,

Ted