Preparing to Wildscape in Sandy Soils

Not everyone's blessed with perfect gardening soils -- in fact, most of us struggle with planting our gardens in soils that are considerably less than perfect. In addition to the problems inherent with any area, your soil may also have been pounded by home building equipment or long-term building usage or any one of a number of different things that make soils a less-than-perfect home for your plants. One soil type that's a real struggle to deal with is sandy soil.

My own bout with sandy soils came when we lived in Lubbock, Texas, nearly 20 years ago. Lubbock is in the middle of the Texas panhandle and it's miles and miles of very flat prairie land (called the "Llano Estacado", or "staked plains" because the land was so featureless that early settlers left stakes to guide travelers across the area.) It's sandy -- and to make matters worse, the winds blow out there.

How bad can a little wind be? Well, during March you can usually watch the panhandle topsoil headed off to Oklahoma as the batch of topsoil from New Mexico starts blowing in. Sand often covered the roadways and it was hard to keep it out of your houses. Little garden patches did okay as long as there was some sort of windbreak -- but in the open, you could quickly find your corn and tomatos buried under a nice layer of unimproved and un-nourishing sand. So what's a frustrated gardener to do -- besides plant grass?

If you want to start a wildscaped garden, your best bet may to begin by building a raised bed. Although some prefer to work the soil as it lies, you'll find it a lot less aggravating to work a plot where you can do "additive" soil remediation. Many sandy soils contain a lot of rocks, and some have been compacted almost to the hardness of concrete once you dig more than a few inches below the surface. Many gardeners recommend that you enclose your area to be wildscaped by logs or bricks before you begin begin digging up your garden and adding the filler material.

What does sandy soil need? Two things, really: a source of organic material (a good compost that should be at least 1/3rd of your soil volume) and a heavier mulch (such as shredded bark, composted sawdust, or even gravel) to keep your hard work from being blown into the next six states when the wind starts back up again.

One problem you may run into with sandy soils is soil salinity. It makes sense that sandy soils near the ocean would have large amounts of salt in them -- but many

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