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Soil, Compost & Mulch

Sandy soil planted with perennials

16 years ago

We live on a mountain with terrible soil so I created two fairly large raised gardens and planted them with mostly perennials and some annuals. Unfortunately, the soil I added turned out to be poor as well. The soil washed out leaving mostly sand. I'm not sure how to amend the soil in such large raised gardens without having to find and dig up all my dormant perennials. Should I just sacrifice the plants I have, dig out the whole thing and start over or is there a way to fix the mess?

Thanks in advance!

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Comments (4)

macthayer
16 years ago
Oh Dear, I don't envy you this problem! I have clay now, but grew up with sand, so I know all about how hard it can be to garden in sand! What I would recommend is to WAIT a little bit. Get everything ready, such as buying the new topsoil, and getting a bunch of small plastic bags, or pots if you have them on hand. As soon as your perennials start to break dormancy (so you can identify them) dig up any you want to save. Then dig out the beds -- having a landscaper help with this part would be great, or anyone with a tractor or lawn mower that has a "scoup" on the front so you don't have to do as much manual labor (we have one). Then put the good dirt back in and replant the perennials. Knock off as much sand as you can without disturbing the roots too much. Hopefully you can make this a "team effort" and find others to help. If not, the plants will live nicely in the plastic bags/pots for quite a while until you can get them back into the ground.

You also need to re-think your drainage, and possibly your placement of the garden beds. If water erosion is a problem, then just putting in new dirt is not going to solve the problem, and it could happen again. Perhaps you need to find some way to shunt the flowing water away from your beds, or, as I said, move the beds so the water doesn't wash over them. Just a thought.

I moved whole gardens like this when we moved houses. It was a lot of work but I saved hundreds of dollars in plants, and left behind full gardens because of course all I took were divisions or volunteer seedlings.

MacThayer
melonhedd
16 years ago
sounds like way too much work for me - have you tried lasagna beds?
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Kimmsr
16 years ago
Just add lots of compost and other organic matter to those beds, as a mulch, and your soil bacteria will mix that into the mineral portion for you making that into something that will grow good, healthy plants.
If sand is still there the soil did not "wash out", it is still there, although any organic matter that might have been mixed in the sand probably did.
pfmastin
16 years ago
blackberrygirl,
I live in NC and am gardening in sand for the first time. Rather than facing the overwhelming job of trying to amend entire beds before planting, I amended each planting hole and its surrounding area before putting in each plant. Eventually, the dots get connected. When organic matter became available, I amended larger areas. HTH.

Pam

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