Soil retention isn't a problem with container gardening. Water and nutrient retention is the problem. And sand in a container mix only compounds that problem. But I never suggested that you should use garden dirt in a container. Do you think Al's Mix is the only other option? And yes I am well aware of what is called Al's Mix, that it is unique to the Container Gardening forum here, that it is just 1 person's opinion on what is ideal, and that it has several recipes depending on what is being grown in the particular container. Some on that forum do "rave" about it and some do not. Nothing against Al as he works hard to help lots of people over there. But as I said above thousands of us, gardeners all over the world, have container gardened quite successfully for decades without using it or even knowing it existed. There are hundreds of recipes for making your own soil-less container mixes. Al's Mix is just one of them. And there are probably 15-20 varieties of commercially prepared soil-less mixes available to use, several of them superior to any homemade mix recipe. So don't assume that everyone here uses Al's Mix or even agrees with it? If you choose to use it, fine but then the issues or questions you may have about it need to be addressed to that person, that forum as they might understand why you'd be adding sand to a container mix. As Greg said above, an in ground sandy garden can be made productive with lots of work, lots of amending, and careful moisture monitoring. Containers are something else entirely. Dave

I doubt you did any irreversible damage. It sounds like you dug through a top layer of "good" soil and then hit a layer of sand. It's possible someone had imported topsoil for the lawn. I don't think the sand will be a problem unless your topsoil has a lot of clay in it. Either way, you can still amend the soil with compost, manure, etc. I know some books may recommend that kind of deep cultivation, but personally speaking I'd never dig much deeper than the length of a shovel blade. I'm used to heavy clay soils, and it'd be too much darn work.

Lawrence, check out the various dried soups on the market shelves and you'll notice that some of them are, indeed, instant while others require cooking. That's a function of how the veggies were initially processed. To make instant soups, you have to first cook the veggies (yes, even the grains), and then dehydrate them. If you dry raw veggies, they will require cooking. You can just add them to the soup liquid. But it actually works better if you rehydrate them first. To do so, put the amount you need in a bowl. Cover it with warm water. Let it sit 15-20 minutes. Then add the whole thing to the soup kettle. What can you dry for this? Virtually any vegetable you would put into soup. Tomatoes, peppers, squashes, onions, leeks, corn kernels, carrots, green peas, even potatoes. And don't forget the herbs---although, frankly, there are better ways to dry herbs than in a dehydrator. Now then, if you want to go a step further, and make chicken or beef stock, you can dry that, too. We think boullion cubes are a modern invention, but the technique goes back to colonial times. Make your stock. Then boil it down until it is thick and pasty. At this point, back in the day, they would keep going until all the water was evaporated. But you can take that thick paste and pour it in the tray designed for fruit leather. Then let the dehydrator do the rest of the work. When fully dry, either break it into small pieces or grind it to a powder. Store in an airtight container until needed.

For a long time now, the answer to how much space is needed to grow a year's food for one person has ranged from 4,000 square feet to 5,000 square feet, and I believe that's fairly accurate if you are engaging in traditional gardening practices. If you put a lot of time and effort into double-digging the ground-level soil and adding a lot of organic matter to it (you also can add a raised bed above the well-prepared grade-level soil), a la the John Jevons biointensive gardening method, you probably could easily grow a year's supply of fruit, veggies, herbs and some grains and some compost crops to enrich and renew your soil, but that is the sort of thing you slowly work your way towards doing and it can take years. The most helpful book I've ever read on raising the most food in the least space is John Jeavon's "How To Raise More Vegetables....." book that I've linked below. For centuries, people around the world have used biointensive gardening to raise more crops in less space. The Square Foot Garden method advocated by Mel is just a really simplified form of that biointensive growing method. I read the book when it first came out and experimented with SFG spacing, but found I had better success with the spacing and growing methods advocated by John Jeavons. When you build an above-ground bed on top of unimproved grade-level soil and fill it with imported soil to do Square Foot Gardening, you just aren't going to get the heavy yields a person will get from better and deeper improvement of the soil. That's because production will be better when a plant can easily send our roots far and wide into good, fertile, friable soil. My garden is slightly smaller than Dorothy's and I plant very intensively in raised beds which really are just wide rows with narrow paths, using deep beds of native soil amended with lots or organic matter on an annual basis and using ordinary organic methods, and I don't even raise all of our food. However, I do raise much of it, and have plenty to freeze, can, dehydrate, ferment and root cellar. We also give away quite a lot of produce. To garden on a large scale, you have to have a lot of space and even then you have to really focus every year on improving the soil. Your yields will only be as great as the soil quality, moisture availablity and weather allow. I don't want for you to be discouraged though. Even in a garden with only 500 square feet you could raise quite a lot of produce and herbs. You just need to grow everything vertically that you can. I raise the all kinds of crops vertically, using trellises, ladders, fences, tomato cages, etc. to direct the growth of the plants upward as much as possible. I even allow my Seminole pumpkins to escape from the garden and climb nearby trees. The more stuff you grow vertically, the higher yield you get per square foot of garden space. Vertically, you can grow pole beans (snaps, limas and shellies), pole snap peas, pole southern peas, tomatoes, peppers (caged or staked), muskmelons and cantaloupes, refrigerator-type watermelons, cucumbers, some winter and summer squash and mini-pumpkins, and even potatoes (in boxes, cages, potato grow bags or bins) and sweet potatoes (with the potatoes in the ground and the foliage climbing a fence, trellis or tomato cage). You can increase yields by interplanting 2 or more veggies together. As the earlier veggie matures, the one that needs a longer period to mature can fill in the space left after the earlier crop is harvested. For example, you can plant radishes in the same rows with carrots. The radishes will sprout and grow more quickly, but after you pull the radishes, the carrots will use the space they vacated. Or, you can interplant root crops with leaf crops like carrots with lettuce. It takes time to learn how to use these kinds of combinations to get the best use of your soil, but the John Jeavons book explains the various options in great detail. In his recession gardening book, Jim Wilson (of Victory Garden South fame) says that he believes a garden has to be at least 500 square feet in order for you to raise enough edible crops to break even/make money when you compare the amount of money spent to grow the garden to the dollar value of the crops raised. Anything less than that is still good, but not a winner economically. I'd agree with that premise, but if you use a lot of fresh herbs and you're growing them instead of raising them, then you could be breaking even/saving enough money that your garden is a good investment even if it is less than 500 square feet. When growing your own food, grow what you really like to eat and grow what makes sense economically. In a small garden, it is hard to economically justify growing potatoes because of the amount of space they use up and because potatoes are pretty inexpensive at the grocery store. Economically, I believe tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, virtually all herbs, asparagus, and pole beans and peas probably give the greatest return economically if raised vertically. If you are able to successfully grow winter and summer squash without losing the plants to pests, they can produce quite a lot per square foot, but they also tend to sprawl and take up a lot of space. However, it isn't all about economics. It also is about quality and flavor. I've never yet bought a potato at the grocery store that tastes as good as one that's home-grown. We all talk about the luscious flavor of a home-grown tomato, but a home-grown potato is just as luscious in its own way. And, as for canning and other forms of food preservation, given the size of your beds at the present time, I don't think you'll be doing much food preservation this summer unless you are preserving everything you raise instead of eating it fresh. A garden the size of yours can supply you with a reasonable amount of fresh produce weekly, but not enough that you'll have a surplus to preserve. I have a very large garden and tend to plan lunch and dinner when I am out harvesting early in the day. Anything I'm harvesting that we won't eat in the next few days, I go ahead and freeze, can, dehydrate, ferment or root cellar, or make plans to share it with a family member or friend. Don't forget that you can raise quite a lot of veggies in containers too, and if you put them on a simple drip irrigation system with a timer, that's about as carefree as gardening can be. Even with a very large garden, I generally plant between 40 and 100 containers per year. I didn't do that last year because I was expecting severe drought and that likely was a pretty good decision, but I missed my containers last year, so I'm bringing them back this year. You also can squeeze in some veggie and herbs into ornamental landscape beds, including the various colors of swiss chard and peppers of all kinds, if those beds are inaccessible to rabbits and other critters. They even have cascading forms of tomatoes, like Tumbling Tom Red and Tumbling Tom Yellow, for example, that you can grow in hanging baskets. My first garden here, which I planted 6 months before we broke ground for the house was two 4' x 8' beds and they produced a surprisingly large amount of produce and a few flowers. Every year after that I added to the garden and I'm not through adding to it yet. I have an expansion plan in place for January and February, Lord willing and if the creek don't rise. A lot of the credit for my improved garden yields goes to the ongoing effort to improve the soil as John Jeavons teaches a person to do, but a lot also goes to my endless quest to raise something vertically. I've even raised 12 to 15 lb pumpkins vertically on a fence by creating fabric slings to support the weight of the pumpkins as they enlarged. I started more simply with small melons, then once I had mastered raising them vertically, moved up to larger melons, then watermelons, then small pumpkins and winter squash, and then larger ones. As your gardening skills progress, you find yourself able to grow in ways you never dreamed were possible. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: How To Grow More Vegetables Than You Thought Possible