Quintin, Dan Halsey of Southwoods Center is a great guy and a talented designer who does very professional work (and he is a sometime contributor to this forum), but he's been in the business long
enough that the rates he (rightfully) charges may be beyond your budget. There are lots of other designers in the Twin Cities who would be eager to share what they learned in their PDCs -- and ideally, what they learned practicing in the years after -- for a more modest sum.
For what it's worth, when I've done site consultations and designs in eastern Kansas, I charge only $200-$300. That may be a tenth what a designer of Dan's talents would charge. It might also be a tenth as valuable; it's hard to say because designs are rarely (if ever) implemented exactly as specified, so in practice it's impossible to say what degree of success was actually due to the designer. Frequently the designer (much like an architect) gets credit for anything that works and avoids blame for anything that doesn't.
So my advice to you would be to ask to see examples of a designers' work in person before hiring them. Designs are all well and good, but they don't show you what happened 5 years later. Just to give one example, one of my very favorite designs I'm most proud of centers around a pear tree. The pear tree has never flowered and probably will never produce fruit, because it's 20 feet from a black walnut tree. There are mulberry
trees in between, as recommended in
books by
Toby Hemenway and others, but they are not enough to prevent the pear tree being poisoned. Now that I know that, it's a cautionary tale and I gladly admit it when describing the design, but to look at the plans from 7 years ago you would never know that the pear would be unproductive.
Good luck!
