Sounds like you have alot of good stuff. I think eventually the worms will find it. When it rains go try to find some or buy them off of the internet. There are 3 different kinds but I think most or all do well in good soil.

Ha -- the only raised bed I ever built, I put "soil" into from bags at the store. Then I went and collected loads of worms from the street when it rained and put them in. They all left.

Now, years and lots of compost later, there are worms in this bed. Maybe it will just take years (and compost) to make this very sandy soil worth anything. At least we know it grows tasteless cabbage :)

Thanks, blazeaglory -- so we'll put in everything he bought, and start a compost pile. I wonder if the worms they sell for fishing woiuld work?

It will be an epic struggle to make beach sand productive. However, there is a vast and matchless resource at hand: seaweed. Pile it and pile it one. Compost it, keep everything mulched with it.

I would be willing to bet that many if not most crops will grow well on the sand in a very heavy mulch of seaweed. Potatoes were often grown that way, and the vigor of the seed potato lends itself to the method. Tiny-seeded crops will be much more difficult. Stick with big seeds: potato, corn (maybe after the sand has been well built up with seaweed compost), beans. Too late for potatoes now in NC, go for bush beans which will tolerate wind better than trellised beans. Cowpeas as well.

I've just been reading the threads about peat and bagged mixes -- don't want to wreck anything with these things, yet it seems that the sand here won't grow great veggies if it doesn't have help.

Avoiding peat and/or bagged mixes may apply for container gardening, but it your situation they're perfectly acceptable. In fact, you'll need all the organic matter you can muster - and then some. However, in the quantities you require, bagged mixes will get expensive. Best to buy pine bark fines, spaghnum peat and manure in bulk, if you can find it.

For a small vegetable bed I would build a frame out of 2 x 12 lumber. Excavate the sand within the proposed bed to a depth of 12". Then start piling in the organic matter - shredded pine bark, manure, peat moss, compost, etc. Incorporate this with the sand in the bottom of the excavation and then keep adding stuff and incorporating until you have built-up the soil level to near the top of the frame.

It's great that you got a soil test, but it will not really apply to the bed since it will be so heavily amended. For the first season, I'd add dolomite lime at a rate of 5 lbs. per 100 sq. ft. For the fertilizer, I'd apply it at twice the recommended rate and work it into the soil a full 12". This, with the addition of some side dressing throughout the growing season, should grow good vegetables. At the end of the season, get another soil test. This will guide you in future amendments.

The beds will require annual additions of compost or other organic matter as sand has an unending capacity to digest whatever you add. For a little more durability, I would add a hundred pounds of Turface along with the organic amendments. This is a calcined clay product which has very good nutrient and water-holding characteristics and which will last for many years. You can Another thing that I do annually is plant a cover crop of winter rye and hairy vetch. Planted in the fall, it will grow slowly throughout the winter and then can be plowed under in the spring prior to planting. It's an excellent source of organic matter and nutrients.

Sand is at once a curse and a blessing. It's very difficult to get into shape, but once you have, it's really an excellent growing medium.

Sounds like you have a good start,peat,compost & other organic matter will help with the sand.
You do not need earthworms, what did the Indians do before white men bought red worms & night crawlers to the new world.
I have gardened for 20 years with out all the earth worms.
Sure they are good for most soils,but do not sweat the small stuff. Compost, water & mulch are more important for now.
You should check phone book, inter net for local farms or ranch. See if you can get some composted manure from them, it will take longer for you to build a garden in pure sand.
You may not do well the first year or two, but slowly the sand will hold the compost & you will have a great garden.
I hope it works great the fist time you plant, but know that not all sand will change to soil with just one application of compost.

You can do it! I did it, but I had to buy a lot of bagged browns over the years. Each time you plant add more OM. Sometimes I add more OM three times a week, or whenever but not like once a year. You can work on it a little everyday. It takes years to improve but it will.

Thank you everyone! Exciting ideas, and great encouragement.
I've never seen sea weed here, but in the Pamlico sound there is something called sea grass and I talked to a guy once who was filling bags with it for his garden -- I'll definitely get some! And I think there are horses to the south for the manure. So we'll get more of the pine bark/peat/compost mix too. Will check out the Turface stuff as well.

Is it okay to add dolomitic lime if the ph is already 6.5? I guess that would ammend the calcium deficiency, right?

I think I actually found hairy vetch already growing in the yard, so I know it will grow here.

Another note of encouragement -- tonight I made an amazing cole slaw with the very mild cabbage by adding mayo, yogurt, lemon, onion, sugar, medjool dates, pistachios, and clementines. Yum.

It's exciting to think that by adding lots of OM this could actually become a good garden. I like epic struggles. :)

Seaweed tends to pile in certain places when storms come from a certain wind direction, then gets covered with sand within weeks or days. Ask around. The other stuff is eelgrass which is better than nothing but not comparable to true seaweed. There is nothing like it. Most of the planet's fertility has gone to the ocean over the past 10,000 years.

Is it okay to add dolomitic lime if the ph is already 6.5? I guess that would amend the calcium deficiency, right?

One thing to be aware of is the CEC number on your soil test. It stands for cation exchange capacity. Without getting too scientific, CEC is a way of quantifying "how much" (in the way of nutrients) your soil can hold. As you might expect, a CEC of 2.0 is extremely low. Sand has almost no capacity to hold nutrients. On the bright side, with a low CEC, nutrient values can be changed quickly. So, even though your test shows "high" magnesium, that will change with the addition of organic matter. Based on my experience, peat and pine bark together are a) low in calcium and magnesium; and, b) low pH. So, the addition of dolomitic lime will help on both counts.

Several common cultivated vegetables originated in the wild on coasts so you could try them. Beets, chard, seakale, asparagus, fennel and all the cabbage relatives started life by the sea. Carrots also like a sandy soil.

If rosemary is happy I should imagine that bay, sage, oregano and thyme would be too. Bay trees have naturalised on the coast here.

That sand, like my Lake Michigan beach sand, needs organic matter to fill in the voids between the sand particles and hold both nutrients and moisture in the root zone. So what your friend needs to do is look around to see what organic matter is available. Seaweed, deciduous tree leave, animal manures but not by themselves, what is available and inexpensive and renewable. Peat moss might be an option but it is a non renewable resource and some people can get leaf mold, a much better product, for free from the dump sites those tree leaves are often taken to.
The soil test showed a soil pH of 6.5, about mid range for most plants (6.2 to 6.8 is the best range) but also says the Calcium and Magnesium levels are not balanced. The soil test should have addressed that and if lime is added it should be Calcitic, not Dolomitic lime. Here Gypsum might be an option.
How much organic matter is in that soil?

I'm guessing nil on the organic matter!

Good advice here and I have little to add. I second the advice not to bother trying to add worms. If conditions are right they will come anyway, if not any worms you add will leave or die. If you're bringing in composted manure and such you'll eventually get some worms or worm eggs and they'll take up residence.

Organic matter, more and more. Is there a Starbucks around?

Thank you, everyone, for continued wonderful ideas and advice. It's terrific to have such a resource of knowledge and help!

A bay leaf tree? Now, that would be cool. I'll only get to see this place spring, and fall, but it will be fun to see how it develops.

The neighbor who grows tomatoes and peppers said "There tends to be a lot of organic matter in the soil" But when I dig, I see SAND and that's all. (except for a layer of darker sand right at the root zone of the grass -- which might be from a sod farm, since grass doesn't grow here without a lot of help.)

Starbucks . . . I think this island is one of the last places in the US with no chains, but there are coffee shops, so that's a great idea. (and okay, there is one Food Lion)

We built a little 4 X 4 raised bed yesterday -- now to fill it with eel grass, manure, anything we can find!

There is a guy out in Washington State who has a system which can turn any soil condition into a booming success. I watched his free video two months ago and have converted my garden and orchard and flower beds to his system. No more weeds, no more fertilizer, no more digging or turning the soil, no more herbicides. Almost no more work! And the results are wonderful already, with great expectations of ever increasingly bountiful harvests. See the below link for more information. It changed my soil, my produce and my aching back.

Here is a link that might be useful: Easy, organic gardening and farming.

There is a guy out in Washington State who has a system which can turn any soil condition into a booming success.

A few too many GRM (God references per minute) for my tastes, but a good video nonetheless.

Gautschi and company are telling you the same thing I have been telling people here for about 25 years now. The video is about an hour and a half long, but is worthwhile.

I made it about 5 min, saw he gave up on manure (?) and tilling, just uses wood chips? I tried to "fast forward" through the hymn and even though the timer said 11 min, it was replaying the beginning, and any time I click on the time line it starts over. But my DSL is too slow to just play the whole thing without restarting Can someone boil this down for me? We used some 15-yr old wood chips to start our garden 4 yrs ago, it's done great, but can't get any more Has he found some way to use fresh wood chips in a year or 2 instead of 15? He doesn't compost or cover crop at all?

I can get fresh wood chips (though may have to pay for large quantities since I'm not convenient for the big tree services to come dump), also have this 40-yr old manure - wouldn't that be just as good as the wood chips (or would decomposed wood chips have more N)?

I would think the wood chips would eventually compost themselves into the soil. How long would it take for new wood chips to compost from a top cover into Nitrogen in the soil? I would think it would slowly happen over a few years while adding more top cover (manure and woodchips on top)? So would you necessarily have to use old wood chips as the new chips will eventually compost? With new wood chips I would add your manure under the chips to compensate for lack of nitrogen.

There are a couple rather heated discussions of this method on the Veggie thread and the OG gardening thread. Search Back to Eden Gardening Method. Lots of valid pros and cons brought up in these discussions

If you watch the whole video, you see that it does not work when people incorporate the chips into the soil (I would think it ties up the N). Also, one of the test gardens failed miserably because the people didn't plant deep enough. Still, it worked in the second test garden (in the desert) , and the guy who originated it gets great results.

budbasket , if you'd like to keep us posted about your progress with this method, please join in the BTE experiment. There are a couple of us doing this method experimentally this year and we'll post photos. I've got a small BTE plot at my own garden in West Virginia. I'd never dump wood chips into my main garden -- I just happened to have an area already covered in 4 year old chips, so I decided to experiment--plant the same things on the same day and watch progress and results.

I didn't know WV had a z5, Elisa. Must be way up, huh?

Gautschi tells you that tilling the wood chips into the soil is not the best thing to do, and the wood chips need to be cut during a time of year when they have green leaves to add Nitrogen to the mix. I have seen the same results as he gets using tree leaves as mulch as well as composting them.
Basically what he is saying is add organic matter to your soil. There is no reason to experiment to see if it works, many of us have already done that and adding lots of organic matter to any soil creates a good, healthy soil that will grow strong and healthy plants that are less desireable to insect pests and can ward off plant disease better.

Anyone who's used Al's 5-1-1 or any of the other bark-heavy container mixes knows just how excellent pine bark fines are as both a container substrate and soil amendment. One of my garden beds is situated at the foot of a steep bank that I've been trying to stabilize for a number of years using annual additions of pine bark mulch. Every winter, a good deal of the mulch is blown and deposited in the garden - probably a good 1" of finely textured mulch each year. That bed is consistently my best performer - and, when I pull a soil sample for testing - it is as close to ideally balanced as any of my beds. Having said this, I wouldn't anticipate hardwood chips to perform nearly as well.

As kimmr pointed out, there's no "secret" to the system. It's simply consistent addition of copious amount of organic matter. I would add two that, since the wood chips (and I'm assuming a preponderance of conifer wood chips in Gautschi's situation) are very slow to decompose, they provide a better source of OM than some other options. Also, I would guess that the lignins and other chemical components of conifer bark would result in a high level of pure humus once it's fully decomposed.

The whole idea is stupid. You can't take a bad soil and make it good soil by throw a bunch of wood chips on it. If you want to use them as mulch you would first have to dig in the OM and then you could use wood chips as a mulch for weeds. But, there goes the whole no work, no turning thing. No work in the soil means no improvement. If you just put down wood and wait for a few years you may get some improvement, but even if dig the wood into the soil and then add more wood on top, it won't break down fast. Try burying a piece of wood and see how long it takes to break down. Some soft wood break down faster if they get a lot of water, but some hard woods take a really long time even with a lot of water.

It depends greatly on soil type. Tropical you are used to dealing with very light soil, where wood does rot slowly, not mention the CA climate which favors preservation because of low humidity (which is why CA carpenters I have known out here have a hard time grasping how quick stuff can rot). In a wet clay soil and wet climate it can be much faster, probably an order of magnitude.

Told you it was controversial.

Yep -- we're up in the mountains in WV near Canaan Valley, about 3K feet. Average 150 - 200 inches of snow a year. I can drive 12 miles down the mountain and be in zone 6.

The wood chips you put on your soil as mulch will, eventually, become organic matter in your soil as the soil bacteria digest them which is why even wood chips used as mulch "disappear". Getting organic matter into soil can be done quicker by using the leaves from deciduous trees. Adding organic matter to your soil will not, magically, turn that soil into something it is not. Adding OM to clay soil will not turn it into Loam nor will adding OM to sand make it loam, but that OM will change your soil into something that will grow strong and healthy plants.