Clairdo, the first thing you should probably find out is if your town/city uses actual Sodium Chloride to salt the road, or if they use Potassium Chloride or some other "environmental" salt. Most cities around here are using environmental salt that won't harm vegetation. If that's the case, a little sand won't harm most plants and you probably have a lot more choice. What's the area like otherwise, for drainage, sun, etc.? Does grass grow there? And what sort of thing were you wanting to plant... perennials, annuals, shrubs, trees? Hope to be of more help if you can give a little more info. p.s. also, do you know what hardiness zone you are in?

Purlisa: I no longer post for the pubic, but I make exceptions when people ask for me specifically. I respect & learn from honest folks like you who share about their garden. I learn more from honest folks who talk about problems in their garden, than gorgeous pics. of roses (with zero details as to type of soil & pH-level & climate & annual rainfall). That's my pet-peeve in HMF, folks just post pics, without specifying if it's own-root or grafted, zero info. on planting zone & type of soil & climate. If you click on my Houzz profile-picture , I updated to include tips on how to tell which own-roots are appropriate for which soil pH, type of soil & climate, just by looking at the leaves. https://www.houzz.com/user/strawchicago I received 8 roses yesterday 6/15 from RU summer sale, they are BIG, and some are over 2 feet tall & with buds & blooms .. very healthy. These roses are bigger & more blooms that the 7 roses I bought full-price early May. My last house was acidic clay: soft & easy to dig, with blue hydrangeas & deep-colors roses. My current house is alkaline clay: rock-hard, need a pick-ax to dig, pink hydrangeas, and roses have faded colors. Roses are much healthier in alkaline clay. My purpose of posting is to help foiks NOT to make the same mistakes like I did in my 30+ years of growing roses, and 110 own-root varieties. My B.S. is in Computer Science, minor in Chemistry, so I want to use my background to help folks. If you have sticky & dense clay, skip the Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate), since it hardens clay further. MAGNESIUM DEFICIENCY IS RARE, EXCEPT IN SANDY SOIL (this is from the booklet when I got my soil tested by EarthCo.) My sticky clay soil was tested exceedingly high in magnesium. Skip the molasses, I tested for many years and it attracts rose-slugs, plus sugarly stuff LOWERS soil pH, sugar sours things fast. Azomite is similar to dolomitic lime (both have pH 9), but Azomite works faster. Digging deep, and remove the dense & icky clay & rocks at bottom helps with drainage, so acidic rain water don't sit at the bottom to rot roots. If your clay soil is acidic, COARSE sand (paver's sand) is good on top. BAGGED SAND AT STORES IS VERY ALKALINE, so it will neutralize the acidity of rain. Niels in Denmark, with hundreds of roses, put sand on top of his acidic clay. Skip the alfalfa, it becomes VERY ACIDIC like Kimchi if decays in acidic rain water. Many folks report roses breaking out in blackspots after "sour alfalfa tea", it's like watering roses with sauerkraut or Kimchi-water. At least Kimchi or sauerkraut has salt to control the acidity, but I already tested acidic-alfalfa-tea and it made leaves thinner, thanks to its acidity. Since my clay is rock-hard alkaline at pH near 8, I use acidic pine bark (pH 4) to fix my clay. People root roses in sand. I read a book by a CA rose-grower on the coast (mild temperate climate), he bought a land filled with sand and converted into a rose nursery, to sell cut-flowers !! Here's an excerpt from Houzz when I googled on clay .. folks in CA have heavy abode clay, while I have dolomitic clay. But both are mineral-rich clay. Kittymoonbeam have over 100+ roses in Southern CA, wrote this in Houzz .. from my experience I agree with her 100% .. I killed plenty of roses with acidic organic matter in the planting hole. And Roses Unlimited's tip of 1 cup of alfalfa meal mix-in WORKS ONLY FOR THEIR ALKALINE-TAP WATER inside nursery, but NOT FOR OUTDOOR ACIDIC RAIN, with pH 4.5 in my Chicagoland, and even more acidic rain on the East Coast. Kittymoonbeam - "I just came from a soils class by a local nurseryman. He said DON'T add organic amendment into the soil. The plants only tolerate it, not prosper in it. The short of it is that eventually it breaks down and rots causing oxygen problems in the root zone. A NASA guy said NO terrestrial plant wants to live in ground up dead tree. So most potting soils are only good for maybe 5 months, then they start harming plants. The growers know the plants can only survive a short period before they decline in that mix. Potting up in non amended soil causes no harm. You can grow in 100 percent sand as long as you water and feed often enough. Strawberry leaves from plants grown in sand were twice the size of those in the premium potting mix! There are no overwatering issues. Why the change from propagation in soil to wood products is a long story. However, we've all been taught to do it. But no one ever used to in the old days. Disneyland removed their riverbed soil and replaced with amended soil. After a few years, they took it all out and purchased new riverbed sandy loam and now they only mulch on top. This is all new to me but that's the way it was for millions of years. The organic stuff stays on top where it breaks down and travels to the roots below. Roots want a purely mineral soil with as much oxygen as they can get and still be moist." Kittymoonbeam. Lauren (Los Angeles, 10a, Sunset Zone 19) - kittymoonbeam, that does seem to make sense. Limited personal experience has also showed me that top dressing compost with shredded leaves/mulch produced better results than than simply mixing some compost into the surrounding soil" Lauren

These are the 'slave huts' on Bonaire (Dutch Antilles). These are less than 20 feet from the water. Fortunately, hurricanes are rare in that part of the Caribbean, so the slaves were not in danger that way. Originally, the huts had thatch roofs, updating in recent years included a more permanent roof.

Thank you straw and everyone for your photos and detailed info. I used to participate regularly here on this forum years ago, and then got rid of a lot of my roses. I have a lot of shade and I had a lot of jobs and no time and so I gave up on roses. I've found myself venturing over to this forum very hesitantly lol, lest I get sucked back in! But seriously I am thinking of adding a rose or 12 back to my garden, and I really appreciate some of the honest descriptions here (as well as the laughs - sitting here alone laughing out loud at some of them!). I know some of it is subjective, some depends on the zone or even the particular garden, but it's a starting point. Your photos are all gorgeous and Tina your garden is absolutely lovely! Thank you all for sharing! :) Dee Edited to say, I meant to thank Straw (and everyone who participated) for ALL the posts you've had recently, not just this one - so very much great info! Own root, roses for the vase, roses for your climate, in ground vs. in pot, etc. THANK YOU!!