gardening in sandy soil

[chic rustler]

so, I haven't seen a worm in my garden yet.....and I always have plenty of animal waste from butchering. I have been burying these things in the bare spots of my garden about a foot deep. I'm hopeful that it will eventually bring the worms in. kind of like trench composting, but with nasty stuff.

a post hole digger works well. just dig a 2 foot hole, dump the waste bucket and cover and remulch.

 

[baymule]

Maybe you need to "import" some worms into your garden. After all, they would have to cross a barren land to get there. Find a nice worm digging spot and dig some for the garden.

 

[baymule]

Your sand makes mine look like a loam..... impressed you can grow anything in that.

Looking on the bright side, I never have mud! It is hard to grow a garden, grass or anything. The wood chip mulch piles we have will be put to good use.

 

[flowerbug]

add a few percent of clay.

if you have animals you can feed it in small amounts to the animals and let them distribute it for your out their other end...

this is also a good way to get trace nutrients distributed as long as those are not put in toxic amounts into the feed. and of course, the animals should not be objecting...

my animals of choice are worms. so they do not do broadscale distribution. i have to carry them to the gardens in their buckets and release them. the then move nutrients around a little.

 

[flowerbug]

as for importing most worms, many will not do well in all sand. the common night crawler in North America will use clay to line the burrows. so you find them where clay is (and they've been introduced - it is always a good idea to not introduce worm species to sensitive areas because they can strip organic matter and certain plants are not happy to lose their cover).

when i started gardening here worms were non-existant. i've since been adding a few hundred thousand a worms a year to the gardens. almost all of them die (they are not native and not suited for this area - on purpose). in the worm buckets i do breed some native worms but they are slow to increase in comparison to the composting worms i use. some of these persist from year to year and i will find them in gardens i've amended with organic matter. this fall i've been happy to see some gardens looking much more active and with plenty of earth worms. it takes several years to really get them going. many animals love to eat them. they are the garlic and cheese linguini of the animal kingdom.

i have the opposite problem (mostly clay, not too much sand).

i much prefer it because the soil is fertile but it has issues (hard to work when wet - you have to learn to be patient). the good thing though is that while many people around here who have a lot of sand are out watering every day to keep their garden's going or they give up i can often go every other or every third day.

if you want to ship me sand i'll trade for clay... (just kidding ... ) if you want to amend a garden for improving your soil you don't need to add that much clay at all to see good results. add a little bit and then see how it goes. don't get too crazy.

i know this because i've been working the soil the other direction. i add tons of compost/humus and some sand to the clay and eventually it looks very nice and grows most garden veggies pretty well. i keep worm bins with garden dirt in them. it takes a large amount of other things to make that clay look like prime garden soil.

when i first started growing things here some garden veggies would look rather sick when they tried to grow. now they are doing much better.