Hey Bill, welcome to this forum. :)

Reading your post, a number of thoughts came to mind. When you wrote "I did a search and quickly got over whelmed. Hope y'all don't mind me asking straight out" -- the first thought I had was, have you read the FAQs of this forum?

The Soil, Compost and Mulch FAQ Page is a good place to start here. I'd strongly suggest reading all the files there and giving yourself a week to think them over and digest them.

Then, if you still have questions -- and you likely will -- c'mon back here and ask them, okay?

There's so much about gardening which is complex and dense when anyone starts to make a change, or tries to figure out how things work in a new situation. Over time, working with your own soil and trying different solutions, you'll likely find solutions which work for you.

The first step I'd suggest to you in trying to find immediate answers to your problem, is to put your own personal energies into discovering what has worked for others in the past. Then, ask folks here who may know what you want to know: "what works for you?"

Have faith. Take your own experience seriously. Do your homework. And then... c'mon back here, and ask simple questions about what does and doesn't work for you, and why. In my experience, if you put in that effort you'll likely get solid help here.

All the best,
-Patrick

Bill, I think you have enough stuff in there. I would cover with mulch until ready to plant. I would do some searches on crop rotation which (you might already know ths)is to not plant the same crop in the same place each season but rather rotate them. This is becoz disease spores, bacteria whatever, and pests specific to that crop can reside in that soil. I would also search around for what crop or flower or herb you can interplant with the tomatoes to help decrease disease risk. Do you garden organically? I have found much success in this method in that I have lots of birds, and spiders, toads, etc that help with the pest control. I would also give the tomatoes enough air space, don't crowd them. Also do they get full sun? I've never done it, but experts say it's a good idea to get a soil test so that you know if you should add the greensand (not sure what nutrient that puts in), alfalfa (nitrogen), etc and in what quantities. I think you will have more success this year.

I'll second Patrick's comments. If you were overwhelmed by searching here, if people started answering your open ended questions, you'd be overwhelmed again.

From your description of what you're trying to do, I think lasagna gardening might work for you. It's basically composting in place by creating layers, alternating "greens" and "browns" (see the FAQ for definitions and examples). A variation of lasagna gardening is interbay mulch. Try searching on lasagna. Then try interbay. Then try lasagne (it's often misspelled that way).

What you have for soil and what your need to do to make that soil into something good and healthy that will grow strong and healthy plants can only be determined by you. Straw is a good source of organic matter, but has very little nutrient value while grass clippings mostly are a source of Nitrogen and some few other nutrients. Tilling organic matter into sand stimulates the soil bacteria to digest what is tilled in so fast that there is very little residual, humus, build up in the soil and you want a humus level of between 6 and 8 percent.
Before adding anything other than organic matter to soil you need a good, reliable soil test done for base nutrient load and soil pH levels so contact your local office of the Washington State University USDA Cooperative Extension Service to find out about that. When you can in the spring you can also dig in with these simple soil tests,

1. Structure. From that soil sample put enough of the rest to make a 4 inch level in a clear 1 quart jar, with a tight fitting lid. Fill that jar with water and replace the lid, tightly. Shake the jar vigorously and then let it stand for 24 hours. Your soil will settle out according to soil particle size and weight. A good loam will have about 1-3/4 inch (about 45%) of sand on the bottom. about 1 inch (about 25%) of silt next, about 1 inch (25%) of clay above that, and about 1/4 inch (about 5%) of organic matter on the top.

2) Drainage. Dig a hole 1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water. After that water drains away refill the hole with more water and time how long it takes that to drain away. Anything less than 2 hours and your soil drains too quickly and needs more organic matter to slow that drainage down. Anything over 6 hours and the soil drains too slowly and needs lots of organic matter to speed it up.

3) Tilth. Take a handful of your slightly damp soil and squeeze it tightly. When the pressure is released the soil should hold together in that clump, but when poked with a finger that clump should fall apart.

4) Smell. What does your soil smell like? A pleasant, rich earthy odor? Putrid, offensive, repugnant odor? The more organic matter in your soil the more active the soil bacteria will be and the nicer you soil will smell.

5) Life. How many earthworms per shovel full were there? 5 or more indicates a pretty healthy soil. Fewer than 5, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, indicates a soil that is not healthy.
to see what you do have and what needs to be done to your soil to make that into that good, healthy soil.

Here is a link that might be useful: WSU CES

Patrick,
thanks for the welcome. I'll start reading those facts right away.

louisianagal,
yes I do garden organically. I have a ton of spiders and tree frongs around. I haven't tried crop rotation yet. I've heard about it and read about it. But my lil back yard garden don't allow for that much. One reason I want to expand. Which leads to another problem you mention. Over crowding my plants. I spaced them out more last year but it was still too close. I've read that sandy soil don't hole any neutriants, so that is one reason I was adding the green sand.

Thanks bpgreen,
I'll do the searches today.

kimmsr,
thanks for the quick tests. As soon as we dry out I'll give them a go. We've already had double the normal amount of rain for this month with another big storm coming in today. I can answer #5 already. From digging around in the spring and the fall last year, I only saw 3 or 4 in the whole area. I saw on here that tilling in all the organic matter wasn't a good thing so I turned it in with a shovel and maddox. Is that any better? Besides, I don't own a tiller yet. :)

Oh and thanks for the links and answering my newbie questions.

bill

For those interested in greensand, here is alink.

Here is a link that might be useful: greensand

Bill,

I bought a soil test kit at the same time that I send some soil to the local agricultural extension office. The results were essentially the same. I recommend you get a soil test kit and test your sandy soil.

I would also suggest that you make a raised bed for your garden. I know that your area is somewhat rainy with 38" of rain. The sandy soil will be good for draining excess water.

If I were trying to amend sandy soil, I'd try to find some clay soil to add to the sandy soil. Otherwise, I'd be using compost, and amending the soil according to the results of the soil test.

The greensand is a good idea because of the leaching due to the rain you get.

I'm going to start an argument here by saying that you should till some peat into the soil. I've heard that good quality peat is what you want to find. Eliot Coleman is my source of opinion.

I once lived in Seattle and gardened in a P-patch. (As you probably know, P-Patches are the community owned garden plots.) The original P-patch was a very peaty, loamy place. And the gardens were lush, of course, so the peat wasn't hurting it.

Good luck.

The only time I will go along with tilling is to put clay into sand. If you do kimmsr's tests and find out that you have pure sand, then you might consider that. Putting clay into sand or sand into clay is frightening. I use pure sand as my topsoil over top of limestone rubble base. From there all you need is roots in the soil. Anything you can do to put roots in, deep, is good. Roots are organic matter. When you clip off a plant above ground, those roots remain. You cannot do a better job than Mother Nature in getting the organic matter in there.

One reason your tomatoes might have been disease prone is not enough organic fertilizer. If all you used was compost or nothing, then adding fertilizer will help. The seaweed, alfalfa are great. I would add corn meal and/or milk to really cut down on the disease. So instead of too many spores, you probably had too few bacteria and beneficial fungi that feed off of the fertilizer.

If you can really develop a healthy soil, you might find that you don't need to rotate crops. I know a guy who has been growing the same forage plants in his pasture for 15 years continuously. He uses no chemicals or fertilizers at all. The only thing that happens to his soil is the cattle eat the forage twice a year. They fertilize and the dung beetles bury it. It's the most natural system ever.

This is off-topic from your soil-building inquiry, Bill, but if it is any comfort to you, last summer was just not a banner year for tomatoes in our region. The weather was cooler, wetter, and more overcast than the summer before, when many of us got bumper crops, and I noticed more powdery mildew than usual. We also didn't get an Indian Summer this year, the extra boost of warm, sunny days in September and early October that allows Puget Sound tomatoes to ripen on the vine instead of on the kitchen counter.

Tilling soil, turning soil, any means used to turn material into the soil mechanically is very detrimental to the Soil Food Web, the wee bacteria and fungi that work in your soil to feed the plants that try to grow there. We all actually do "till" our soil any time we put another plant in that soil, but many of us do not deliberately turn our soil over anymore, just to turn our soil over. Many of us now just plunk compost down on top of the soil and then cover that with some other vegetative waste, mulch, and let the soil bacteria work it into the soil for us. Many years ago when we first moved in here I tilled lots of organic matter into the Lake Michigan beach sand I have for soil and I saw, after many years, that the humus level (residual level of organic matter( was not increasing in those tilled beds while it was increasing in the perennial beds that I was not tilling. So a "Duh" moment occured and I stopped tilling those other planting beds and just plunked compost and other organic matter on top of that soil and saw the humus levels in those soils increase to the 6 to 8 percent levels I have today. Tilling soil is not only a lot of hard work but is detrimental to the soil and the Soil food Web.

Bill - western Washington is a lousy place to grow tomatoes. Probably has nothing to do with your soil. It just plain does not get hot enough or stay dry enough for them to do well without extra work on your part. Early and late blight (2 different diseases) are both common here.

Serious tomato growers in the Olympia area grow them in tomato houses - basically an open-sided greenhouse. The roof keeps the rain off and the warmth in. Otherwise we don't get enough warmth in summer for the fruit to ripen until just before frost if then. The constant dampness favors the early and late blights, and bacterial end rot. Fancy houses have sides that can be rolled down for planting early in spring, then rolled up in summer when it finally gets warm enough.

I don't bother even trying to grow tomatoes here. Not worth the effort. Peas do very well on the other hand! and onions, potatoes, berries and greens.

I have never seen the need for greensand in this area. Depending on what kind of soil you're on. I'm on glacial till soil, so there's no shortage of the minerals found in greensand. If you're on older soil maybe so, but most Puget Lowland soils are so young as to have plenty of minerals.

The main concerns with most soils here is lack of organic matter and low water holding capacity. Water holding capacity is best added through organic matter as our glaciated soils are very deficient in organic matter. So you see they are linked.

Any organic matter will do - straw, leaves, grass clippings, alfalfa, kelp, compost. I composted chicken manure with wood shavings and yard debris for my compost. Wonderful stuff. Any animal manure - rabbit, horse, llama, anything. That's what our soil really needs, not minerals particularly. Sometimes I add dolomite lime or epsom salt for magnesium, like once a year or two. That's it.

Soils are very local! make sure you look for info on the kind of soil you have. Young, sandy, glaciated soil is going to be very different from clay soil or prairie soil. Even sandy soil from more southern areas will be very different as they were not glaciated recently, as our soils were. Older soils are more weathered, meaning potentially less mineral availability, and have had more time to build up organic content, and a better ratio of sand to silt to clay. Young soils like our recently glaciated soils tend to be very sandy without any helpful amount of silt or clay to help hold in water and nutrients, and have had little time to build up organic content. Time being relative here! geologic time is measured in millennia after all.

My soil is very sandy. Technically a soil scientist would call it gravel. It's the consistency of beach sand. Just about everyone who drives on the place gets stuck and I have to pull them out with the 4 wheel. As sandy goes, it doesn't get much softer than this.
I do not "turn in" anything. I use all my mulch (and manure) right on top of the surface. The first 2 years with new soil I have to use a little more manure and double the amount of mulch to help the soil get enough to start the cycle but after the second year I top dress the garden crop leftovers with about 6 inches of course mulch. pretty much everything grows like crazy and taste? Great!
Mulch. It's simple and it simply works

Softmentor, if you have a soil similar to beach sand you have sand, not gravel. Gravel soils have many small stones in them and can also have clay or sand, or both. To learn more about soils you may want to visit the web site linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Soils

Re: crop rotation, I don't have a lot of choice in my little suburban yard either, but my tomatoes have done well in the same little spots for 24 years. I use little if any fertilizer (organic, at planting time) but I do add organic mulches year 'round (grass clippings, leaves in fall, shredded wood in summer). My soil is mostly clay but after all I've read about gardening in sandy soil I don't complain about it.

I live in the midwest but do pay attention to PNW weather because I have a son who lives there. I agree that your weather is probably not conducive to tomato gardening either. Sometimes tomatoes vary by year, too. They do better in hot summers than milder ones, though we haven't had a mild, cooler one for a long time. Tomatoes are also more disease prone in wet weather, and more disease prone than many other plant species given the same weather and growing conditions.

If you follow the good advice on this forum and keep trying you probably can get good tomatoes. Just remember, sometimes Mother Nature will act beyond your control. You can't dictate the weather. Good luck.

Karen

Thank you every one. Seems like I'm mostly on the right track. Will stop turning the soil over, that is for sure. As to the consistancy of the soil in this area. Before I added all the straw, compost and grass clippings; I could get a hand full of the dirt, squeeze it into a ball only to have it fall apart. It also felt very gritty and sharp. Like pins sticking into my palm and fingers.

Thanks about the corn meal tip, I forgot all it. All my crops last years were very bad. So much rain and cold with very little sun between made for a bad year in my lil corner of the world.

Thanks everybody for replying.

I've reread the FAQs page and it seems to be in contrast to what you guys are telling me. They said that the straw and gress clippings were good but that they should be turned into the soil in the fall and the same for compost, turn it in the fall. I assume that what you have said here is the latest and greatest info. but I'm curious which is best.

Bill

Bill: Opinions vary, and some people have very strong feelings on each side. Some do till with good results.

On the other side of the fence is the no-till school of thought. Tilling has been found to break down fungal hyphae and to be generally destructive to the soil food web.

A very good book on this subject is "Teaming With Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web".
Very interesting book.

Karen

Karen,

I just ordered the book you mentioned. It will take several days before it arrives. Until then, can you give me a synopsis of the premise of that book?

BTW, is the title intended to be a double entendre?

- Paul

If you want to read about the Soil Food Web a primer writeen by Dr. Elaine Ingham is available on the web at the link below.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Soil Food Web Primer

Idaho_gardener said:

If I were trying to amend sandy soil, I'd try to find some clay soil to add to the sandy soil. Otherwise, I'd be using compost, and amending the soil according to the results of the soil test.
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I believe I saw over on the tomato forum where someone asked about clay soils and adding sand. A reply was to be careful because you could make the clay even harder by adding sand. He said it would be akin to concrete. Is that true?

Bill

Bill, that topic comes up fairly regularly here. There's a thread dedicated to the topic. Rather than restart that thread here, I'll let you read it.

Paul, I really enjoyed that book because it described so many aspects of soil building and maintenance, and does so in easy to understand terms. It includes basics of soil structure, the soil food web, the many micro and macro organisms involved and what part they play and how and when. Why you need to feed the soil and how it in turn feeds the plant, the soil fungi with incredibly long hyphae which work in a symbiotic relationship with plants roots, which are destroyed by tilling or otherwise disturbing the soil,... there's so much. It attacks in in terms of laws we should follow. It touches upon composting and compost tea, lawn maintenance... you name it. But the good thing is you don't need a PhD in chemistry to understand it. I think most people of average intelligence could absorb the information and understand the principles involved. It doesn't read so much like a textbook.

It's hard to sum up such a book in a few sentences here. But I do think that even organic gardeners who have practiced some of these things in the past can walk away with a better respect for the SFW and a greater understanding of why these things work.

Karen

Yep, just keep adding organic SFW food and the SFW will feed your plants and improve the soil texture. I add lots of organic matter as I'm in my first year of building my very sandy soil here in a sub-tropical climate.

As to the green sand (I think it is a good organic source of potassium or potash as well as other trace minerals.) Do you need it? That would be a question for your soil test. Getting soil tested by your extension office is usually not too $$ and probably worth it to give you a baseline though most of their recomendations are not very organic.

Anyway, sounds like you are doing well so far. Just keep it up.

Here is a link that might be useful: My Garden