I personally would add some amendments like peat or a little top soil. It wouldn't be very expensive and may help a lot.

I was really worried about some seeds my husband brought me to "experiment with". They were carrot seeds we had used some 12 or 15 years ago and he found two large packages of seeds in a box in his shop;)

They actually did great, but I did notice they needed to be kept moist for sure and the loamy/sandy soil was perfect. My dill seeds this year did great, also in a little sand/topsoil/peat.

Good Luck!! I hope you do well with them.

g

As the previous poster said, adding even a little soil will help... is there a recycling center in your area with free compost?

Also, try germinating your seeds inside. Just dampen a coffee filter, sprinkle the seeds into it, and pop it in a ziploc bag... blow some air into it... and throw it on top of the fridge. I did this and my carrots germinated in days. Once the roots start growing, you can plant them. Just drop them in the row and cover with a little soil, they figure out which way to grow. You'll have to be vigilant about watering at first, but they can tolerate a little more once they've sprouted, and it's a much smaller window of time until they get established!

Last year, I got no carrots after direct-seeding in my sandy soil (probably not as severe as yours, but fast-draining nonetheless)... this year, doing it this way, I have a nice crop =)

As you build up your soil over time, you'll end up with ideal carrot soil! They love sandy loam.

I ran out of room in my more tended and prepared vegetable garden this year and as a result I ended up planting in a very sandy spot that wasn't prepared much for gardening.
I dug the soil (sandy & dry) to loosen it to a good depth for roots. I then leveled it and firmed it ever so slightly. I planted my seeds in furrows made to the appropriate planting depths of the seed variety but I then top filled the furrows with good soil instead of using the sandy soil all around them. A soil that can hold moisture to aid in seed germination. It didn't take very much of course. Tamping it down after planting helped to stop erosion from rain & watering as well.
It worked nicely. I imagine you could also line the bottom of your furrows with a better soil first as well.
Hope this might be of some help.

I already added all the amendments I can get right now -- the residue of the beans and some grass clippings. DH mowed the beans then ran around the yard until he filled the bag and we tilled that in.

I can't get any better soil. The stuff we bought to fill some raised beds this spring was the exact, same sand with the exact same acidity and nutrient deficiencies -- mixed 50-50 with a "compost" that is over half extremely coarse wood chips. Its not worth $20/trailer load.

The only free compost available is full of grass seed. I have to bury it underneath the rows with enough of my lousy sand on top to prevent the grass seed from sprouting. I've used boiling water to sterilize a little of it for seed starting, but I can't do it for garden row quantities.

And I can't buy anything. The economic crash hit us very hard and we could barely afford the seed. (I only have internet because we need it for the business).

I'll try the pre-sprouting. It can't be any worse than the last couple years.

I would try both, direct seed and keep it really wet, then start some inside. You may be surprised by the results;)

I know when I get to where money is tight and I need just something to use for planting, Walmart (not my fav store, but in a pinch) has 20 lb potting type soil for under $2. It's nothing special, but may hold your moisture a little better than straight sand;)

That may be enough to help it out.

All the best!!!

g

One thing you can do next year is seed the carrots earlier, during the rainier spring. Yes, the carrots do not need a whole summer to get big, but given the constraints, that is what you could try.
Since your problem is the soil, and you can not get good compost, let me give some advice (I have fought with very sandy soil for years). Clearly you need many tons of compost as well as other amendments.

First, you should never throw any kitchen scrap. Mixed well with the wood chips that are not helping you right now, they will produce real compost within a year. Second, you and your family produce enough urea to properly compost a few tons of material that is too brown, also in a year (you can do this in barrels or trash cans). Third, this winter try any nitrogen-fixing cover crop in any bed that is dormant, and specially in beds that have the wood chips. I would suggest favas, due to nitrogen fixing, great soil penetration, and enormous amounts of biomass, but the seed is expensive. Red clover will do, and it is the only clover that makes it in an acid soil. In fact, with these procedures, you could get straight wood chips (they are free around here) and produce a few tons of compost in a year.

Finally, for the acidity, get the wood ash from any friend who has a wood stove. For a good sized garden, with low pH, half a trash can every year will give every plant a boost. Just put it in the compost pile.

This is for my fall carrots (though the spring ones are also unreliable). This zone has two cool-season periods and the fall one is better since springs get hot FAST.

I already compost my kitchen scraps and yard waste. And I have ashes from my own wood stove.

Much of the garden will be in production through the winter. I can't waste space on cover crops or idle beds because we need the food. The rest will have fall leaves tilled in come November/December to be ready for spring's early crops (my peas go in anytime after New Year's Day).

I'm still learning this year-round-gardening thing but when I figure it out I will be able to have at least a little fresh produce every day of the year.

In zone 7, you will no doubt succeed in having something in the garden every day of the year. The suggestion of diluting kitchen scraps with wood chips (or leaves) was to obtain more compost out of them. They are far too green in all circumstances, and you need the extra compost at your site. Good luck with the peas, I can never grow them successfully in the sandier parts of my garden (though they do well in the compost beds).

Since I also winter garden, let me mention that arugula, corn salad, and miner lettuce are edible through the winter, and reseed themselves.

Most of my winter garden is radicchio and russian kale, both of which can give you collectable seeds. It is good to have carrots, potatoes and beets in the ground, if you can fend off the voles. I also pick garlic seedheads in August, and plant them for garlic shoots in february. And I plant some romaine lettuce in October, it overwinters under cover, and I transplant it in March, so I get lettuce earlier than anyone else.

And of course I use hoophouses, without mulch (you need the bare soil underneath to keep the plants warm). These are fairly cheap to build, probably close to $50-60 for 80 ft of beds, about $27 for both the plastic and the hoops. See the Noble Foundation web pages.

I should have mentioned... another thing I liked about presprouting, was that I could plant the carrot sprouts at their final spacing, since I knew each sprout was viable... no thinning required... so a little seed goes a LONG way.

You might also want to go check out the seed trading forums on gardenweb. If you have any interesting seeds you've gathered, you can trade for a lot of what you might need. Also, generous traders will sometimes offer seeds "for SASE" or "SASBE" --you send them a self-addressed, stamped envelope (or bubble envelope) and they'll send you seeds.

Might help out a bit with the money savings there.

I haven't tried this myself, but maybe you could try fluid-drilling pre-sprouted seeds? Basically you mix the pre-sprouted seeds with a cooled starch gel and sow the lot in the furrow. The gel should supply a little moisture initially as well as protecting the sprouts, and the pre-sprouting should speed things up so you don't have to struggle to keep the bed perfectly moist for so long.

Here's a link that I saved a while back. The bit about fluid-drilling seeds is in Chapter 4

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0302hsted/030201/03020100frame.html

I am on the other side of the country but in a similar situation: extremely fast draining soil, heat, nearly year round gardening in which the fall is often more reliable than spring for cool season crops, budget constraints.

I agree that even with very productive composting the changes in my soil can seem negligible. This week I sowed some leaf amaranth seed on top of very moist soil which I then covered with a thin layer of soil/homemade compost. Firmed soil then watered well and covered with old plywood which I raised slightly(1/3") by propping it up with assorted small stones and peach pits that I screened out of my compost. The seeds began to germinate in 3 days. I kept it covered for 5 days until the seeds were mostly up, lifting it each evening and lightly sprinkling more water if it seemed dry. If you do not happen to be the lucky owner of a pile of old peach pits you might try twist off caps from bottled water or twigs to prop the plywood.

The challenge now is to keep the seedlings from drying out since no rain is likely for the next 5 or 6 months.

Thanks for the various ideas. The fluid drilling sounds especially interesting since it solves both the germination and spacing issue at once.

I haven't intentionally done that "capillarity restoration" but as I've learned more about my soil I've been planting in trenches or forming basins instead of on ridges or hills (as I learned in the heavy clay of my childhood), and I suppose the hoe does that automatically. My "pumpkin patch" looks like the beach after kids have been playing because each "hill" is actually a depression with a 3-4" wall around it to hold water.

Photo taken several weeks ago -- the vines are about to start running now:
{{gwi:65993}}

I have the ruined plywood and I can prop it up on some of the wood chunks I'm sifting out of that nasty "compost" we bought.

I've been gardening on soil so sandy that it almost had too fast a drainage for a standard septic system. To me it's great gardening soil. Put down rows of T tape and plant next to them. Water daily, more often during germination, and you'll do fine. Tom

What's T tape?

Furrow the row, plant seed, lightly cover with sandy soil, lightly cover with grass clippings. Straw works better - a little goes a long way - but grass clippings will do in a pinch.

Don't write off the green manures so fast. You can get a lot of benefit from undersowing.

It's a bit like the lumberjack so busy chopping wood he forgets to sharpen his tools.

Your sandy soil will work harder for you; immediate benefits if your understory plants are keeping weeds down and fertilizing your produce while you are living the good life...

Early use of the garden weasel followed by a grass-clipping mulch are keeping the weeds down nicely. The mulch retains water. Anything I were to grow in the narrow spaces between the plants would require watering instead.

Zone and geology make a great deal of difference. Gardening in Massachusetts on a sand that was unsorted glacial till gave me little trouble -- except that I mulched for the first time (mulch plus soggy clay in a steamy, Western PA summer would have been a sure recipe for fungal diseases).

The Carolina Sandhills are the remains of an ancient beachfront. The sand is nearly pure quartz and the grains are almost all the same size so its quite different from my Massachusetts sand.

And the blistering days (I never thought I'd ever utter the phrase "Its not too hot today. Its only 90.), suck the moisture away so rapidly that I water only at the plants' roots. Any weed seeds in the area that I did not mulch yet are not sprouting because it hasn't rained in 3 weeks.

My neighbor uses an annual rye grass on his garden over the winter with good results, but he doesn't care if his garden gives him nothing between late October and mid-June since he only grows beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and cucumbers. :-)

Is it not too hot to start carrots here yet ? Heck, it really hasn't even been hot much yet this year ... July and August are usually the worst. June is comparatively really nice. I have a theory on why people in the south have the "southern drawl" ... its too hot to talk any faster. : )

The info I've got is to plant at the beginning of August.

I figure its too late to find out how to do it if I wait until planting time to ask. :-D