Beginning.

We bought our house last year, and the best thing about it is the 120ft garden. Its quite over grown and badly planned, and last year we did nothing to it at all. We'd love to have it mainly for the children (we're in the midst of having a straw bale house constructed at the end!), with nice lawn of grass, but would also love a herb garden, veggie patch and a couple of fruit trees. We have a cherry tree, and apples in the gardens either side. Ive just started to dig the beds, and they are FULL of roots weeds, conkers, stones etc. Im trying to condition the soil for better veg. Ive no gardening experience at all, just trying to gleen bit and pieces! Im wondering if a raised bed would be better. Could get some top soil instead of trying to pick out ever little bit of rubbish...

Any other hints and tips?

Many gardeners swear by raised beds, and they're easy and cheap to construct yourself from wood. My "Vegetable Expert" book gave some instructions on it, but there are probably better books suited to it, or indeed websites. There's different layers you can place in the beds so they all mulch down nicely.

Potatoes apparently break up the soil well, you could get some in now if you wanted, I don't know how much of a problem the stones would be. There are also green manures you can grow on the land to add nutrients, like clover.

It really depends on the weed situation. If you have any of the nasties like bindweed, ground elder, couch grass, creeping buttercup or japanese knotweed then I really would pick all the rubbish out, or go for the lazier and much more expensive option of putting down membrane and raised beds then filling in with top soil and compost. I did this at home as we have all of the above weeds except japanese knotweed so I just seived lots too and that helped.
Good luck and happy gardening!

We have a lot of bind weed but we're getting on top of it and less comes back every year now.

We opted for raised beds for no real reason other than I liked the idea! The area we built it in was very unlevel so we built the raised beds and used the existing soil to fill them, it worked well.

As Galeygoo says Potatoes are very good at clearing soil so I'd be inclined to plant some potatoes in part of it and then dig some decent manure in after you've harvested them. Then you can concentrate on clearing a smaller area rather than trying to tackle the lot in one go.