too much drainage

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zulu9 Raymond, ME Apr 06, 2008

I live on a small pond in Maine and our soil consists of 200 plus feet of fine sand. Last year I started a small garden using bags of soil mixed in with the sand. My garden needed to be watered heavily twice a day to prevent complete drying of the soil. What can I do this year for improvements?

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ecrane3 Dublin, CA(Zone 9a) Apr 06, 2008

I think the best thing you can do is bring in loads and loads of organic material like compost and mix as much of that in your soil as you can. If you can't afford to amend your whole yard all at once, I'd focus on one area at a time and amend as much as you can...my guess is what you did last year was spread a little bit over a large area and that won't really help you too much. Or the other option would be to build yourself some raised beds and bring in good quality topsoil to fill them up with.

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WeeNel Ayrshire Scotland, United Kingdom Apr 07, 2008

the advice from Ecrane is correct, you need to add as much organic stuff as you can lay your hands or pocket on, home made compost, animal manure buy large on sale two for one bags of compost from the garden store, anything that will help to build up the nutrients in your sandy soil AND add body to it will improve the moisture contents for longer, even grass cuttings and leaf mould will help as a mulch till you get your soil built up, I have a sandy soil in lots of areas of my large garden so believe me I know the work that goes into trying to water, the problem being the soil particles are so fine, water just runs through it in Min's, but over the years I have managed to improve this a bit at a time and now I can just about grow anything, still have to water, but not to the extent as before, but also depending on what you want to grow, there are plants that will love this type of soil, things like Lavender for instance likes this type of free draining soil to put on a great show and the perfume as you brush against it is wonderful, there are several others like plants from the European areas that also grow well in this so long as you add some fine grit to allow air into the soil around the roots, sandy soil loosed the benefit of any feeding you do as this gets washed away, so by adding some compost and a little sharp grit will help too, the raised beds is also good ides as this allows you to put less new good soil into smaller areas so you can have some colour and wider choice of plants, but I would also add manure/compost as in the real growing season, the new soil will drain very quickly and you will still have a problem with fast drainage, just not as fast.
hope this all helps you a bit to get you started, and good luck, I am sure over the next few years you will be able to make great improvements to your garden and enjoy the results too. WeeNel.

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