The county yard waste facility does not separate leaves from branches. I *could* get the leaves from them. But it would be at least 50% coarse wood chips, which are worse than useless since they both use nitrogen as they decay AND hold even larger air spaces in the soil than the unadulterated sand. They don't even call the stuff compost. They call it mulch and mulching paths is all its good for. The pine straw that I have in great abundance is far superior as a mulch for trees and landscape plantings and even in parts of the garden. But its just as useless as a soil amendment since resinous, 8-12-inch pine needles don't decompose any faster than coarse wood chips. When I lived in Massachusetts I had leaves in overwhelming abundance and they worked splendidly in the sandy soil (technically unsorted glacial till), I had there. This sand here is far different geologically being closer to washed-quartz play-sand than to the richer glacial till, ecologically with few deciduous trees, and climatologically with months on end of hot, humid weather burns organic material out of the soil with tremendous speed -- after 3 months I can barely detect any difference between the sections of garden where DH tilled in an inch of compost (all we had), and the fresh areas. Which is why I was inquiring about adding clay via cat litter because what worked in other places I've lived is either unavailable or less effective here. :-)

How about just putting the potting soil inside the aquarium covering the top with some plastic (with a couple of holes for aireation)and start your cuttings that way. I'm trying this now. I put some pea gravel (about 2") inside the aquarium, followed by a mixture of soil,perlite. I covered most of it with a 1/4" clear plastic (from Tap Plastics). Put in my cuttings and watered thoroughly but made sure that the excess water stayed in the pea gravel area. That way it doesn't drown the cuttings. Well see what happens. T2

I love the lasagna gardening method. I don't know if this would work for you. In my circumstance, I had grass and I wanted a large garden. I had read that tilling would pull up dormant weed seeds but a house was there previously so may not be a weed issue. The lasagna method is simply layering greens and browns on top of newspaper or cardboard. I layed out cardboard then threw a layer of leaves, cut grass, coffee grinds (from Starbucks) or whatever I could easily get my hands on (seaweed for me). Is your area normally sandy or was the sand added?

TexasRanger, I doubt the nematodes are a serious problem for ornamental plants, especially the native types you grow, but they are for many agricultural plants and I know lcdollar is growing an edible garden, so that's why I mentioned nematodes. The folks to my south who have deep sand (roughly 280' deep) in the Thackerville area have gorgeous ornamentals because they grow the types of plants (mostly natives or at least cultivated ornamentals that were bred from natives) that grow well in sand. They also can grow some vegetables (particularly melons and southern peas) that like the sand. Their sand is not the sandy loam found in much of Oklahoma, it is deep river sand that looks almost like beach sand. I am just a few miles north of Thackerville and don't have that deep river sand. In our areas with sand, we have a light brown sandy loam that is heavy on sand and silt, and short on loam, but it isn't at all that beachy sand like Thackerville has. We call their sand "sugar sand" to distinguish it from regular sandy loam type soils found in much of Oklahoma. If someone is trying to grow the wrong kinds of plants (by wrong, I mean not well-adapted to fast-draining sand) in that deep sugar sand, they are in trouble. My friends who have attempted to grow tomatoes and peppers in deep sugar sand have had to wage protracted, unwinnable wars with root-knot nematodes. I always tease them and tell them they need to truck in some clay to mix with their sand, although I doubt anyone really would want to buy clay soil on purpose. I think your landscape is beautiful and it works for you and fits the architectural style of your home so well. I am sorry if you catch a lot of grief from folks who are adamantly opposed to adding sand. I think you're right on track when you say that a lot of sand must be added. I think most people with dense, slow-draining clay add far too little sand and it does give them even worse soil than the clay they had before because often clay + sand = adobe. Well, for true adobe, I guess they'd have to add straw. I also think that sugar sand works better for edible gardeners when lots of compost is added at the same time because edible plants tend to need the nutrition from the compost and also need soil that drains well but not too well since many vegetable and fruit plants need lots of moisture available consistently in their root zones in order to produce good fruits and vegetables. The first thing I did to improve the very dense red clay around our house was buy one dumptruck load of sand our very first year here. They told us it was topsoil, but it was the worst sugar sand I've ever seen, and I didn't even care, because our clay wasn't going to grow anything we wanted to grow until we did something to fix it. We couldn't really rototill it into the clay because the clay was so dense that even a powerful rear-tine tiller just bounced around on top of the ground, so then we spread hay and straw a foot deep on top of the sand once we had hauled the sand around one wheelbarrow load at a time and raked it out smooth. Since we have strongly sloping property, we wanted to keep the sand from eroding away. Once we had been here 3 or 4 years, we rototilled the sand and compost (the remains of that foot of hay and straw) into the clay and it got a lot better, but since then, the only improvement the lawn area around the house has gotten has been compost layered on top of the ground occasionally. We still get sand occasionally (but not because we buy a a truck load of it) when it erodes during heavy rainfall from the property directly south of us which still has some sand left, although their sand is slowly becoming our sand with each heavy rainfall. I don't mind their sandy loam washing onto our land---it isn't filled with nematodes because it is on top of clay subsoil---but we got up to 4" of sand washed into our garden in a very heavy rainstorm (12.89" in one day) in April 2009 and my whole garden, including several inches of mulch, was buried under wet sand. There wasn't much I could do about it then, but in the fall and winter, I just rototilled all that sand and the mulch that was underneath it, into the garden soil. While it was frustrating that year to have all that weed seed-filled sand on top of the mulch, it didn't harm the garden too much (though the excess moisture made plant growth stall for a couple of months), but I still have a lot more weed issues in the area that got the 4" of sand so I'm still pulling out those weeds every year when they sprout. Oh, and oddly, the ranch right across the street to our east has a lot of that sugar sand, but the only place we have sugar sand is in our creek bed.....because it washes there from the ranch across the road. We have a new back garden (new as of a couple of years ago) about 100-120' west of our house that has native sandy-silty loam in about 70% of the area and I like it, but the voles like it as well, so I am having to be careful with what I plant there because the voles devour the roots of everything. I barely saved my Texas lantana from them by digging it up, putting it in a very large container and pruning back the topgrowth very hard to match the root pruning the hungry voles had done. So far, there isn't much the voles won't eat in that back garden's sandy soil, so it is frustrating to plant back there and watch everything die. They eat fruit tree roots, including native persimmons that popped up in that area on their own after we rototilled it, conflower roots, the fig tree roots, etc. Since we have 10+ acres of wooded land filled with pine voles, we'll never be rid of them, so I think the only way I'll be able to use the new back garden for anything permanent in nature will be to make root cages with 1/4" hardware cloth and plant the root balls within the wire cages. Every year the voles eventually, usually in July, start eating the roots of my annual flowers and veggies in that back garden, but usually I've gotten enough of a harvest from the veggies to feel fairly satisfied with the performance of that garden. I thought gardening in native sandy loam would be easier than amending clay endlessly, and it would be, if we didn't have a non-stop population of voles. An interesting note---in that first year when the voles began eating the roots of everything in the back garden, I frantically dug up everything I could and moved all the plants to the front garden, except for trees (fig and desert willow, which had almost no roots left so I put them in containers and they have recovered). I've never had nematodes in that front garden since it started out as clay, but there must have been nematodes on the roots of something that I dug up that year and moved to a specific raised bed in the front garden because last year one single tomato plant in that bed was covered in nematodes and I raise my own plants so those nematodes weren't brought in from the outside. I so far haven't had nematodes in the back garden as far as I know, but somehow they must have been on a plant I moved from the back to the front in the first Vole War. lcdollar, Your soil looks like brown clay. Black gumbo clay is as black as night. I love the way hugelkultur improves the land, but we have a woodland full of deadfall I can collect in winter and use. Most people here in our area clean up their woodlands and pastures and just burn the wood and brush, or they use prescribed burns out on the big ranchlands to accomplish the same thing. I just compost it or use it in limited hugelkulturs. I don't plant much in a hugelkultur that will need to be harvested for the first couple of years because we have so many snakes here near the Red RIver. I wait until it all has decomposed enough that the snakes cannot climb around freely in it. In our earliest years here, I just added big chunks of wood---burying them several inches below the soil surface in the veggie garden. They decomposed in no time at all....a year or two or three....depending on their size and improved the soil as much as anything else I've ever done. When I added big chunks of wood to my raised beds, the old rancher-old farmer crowd about stroked out and couldn't wait to tell me how big of an idiot I was and how wrong I was and how much I'd regret it. In this case, they were wrong and I've never regretted adding the wood. Yes, I know all about how it will tie up nitrogen as it decomposes, but I just added extra nitrogen to accomodate that, and I had this most lush, lovely, productive gardens ever. I still add wood whenever I can. All I have tried to do with my veggie garden is to turn the soil there into the same soil we have in our woodland areas---that woodland soil comes from decomposing trees, leaves and other plants as well as decomposing animals (wildlife does die, you know, and we don't go in there and bury them) and insects, etc. that fall to the ground and decompose in place. It is the most gorgeous soil, being "built", so to speak, from the top down over the last 50-70 years as the trees grew along the creek and the farmer quit farming that area, and then the woodland expanded and expanded over the decades. If you dig down in the woodland, you find the same horrible red clay we have on most of our property, but it is beneath about a foot of woodland soil. I hope someday that my veggie garden soil is as loamy and rich and dark brownish-black as the woodland soil. It has improved a great deal, but still has a long way to go.