What is the exposure? For veggies, southern exposure is ideal. Northern exposure won't work at all. Would it be possible to raise the area up at all? The reason I ask is that it's a chore to remove lawn. Much easier to just pile compost on top which will kill the grass fairly quickly. You need to put it on to a depth of at least 5 inches. I have compost piles, but when I run out I use LeafGrow, it comes in 1.5 cu. ft. bags for about $5. You will want to amend the soil anyway, so this kills two birds with one stone (I hate that analogy - I raise parakeets for a hobby). When I do this (convert lawn to garden bed), I don't till it up at all the first year. This means you can't plant row crops like lettuce or carrots, but you can easily just dig a little hole for your tomato or pepper plant, or pop a few zucchini seeds in. Then, in th 2nd year, the grass and grass roots will be completely gone, and you can till the whole thing up if you want. I live in Central Delaware (you are in Maryland?) In this area, the very hardest working summer flowers (annuals) are vinca and angelonia (they need full sun). They just bloom their hearts out from mid May until late September. (Well, here's a quirk: the purple angelonia are bloom machines, but not the pink ones.) For someone new to gardening, these would be a good choice. Christine

There is no good reason to remove the sod which also removes your topsoil. The grass and "weeds" that are there will provide a food source for the Soil Food Web if the grass and "weeds" are covered with newspaper, cardboard, builders paper, etc. with that being covered with mulch to hold it in place and hide it. When deprived of light the plants growing under that cover will die and the Soil Food Web will find a food source and get busy converting that organic matter into nutrients other plants can use to grow strong and healthy. With your sand you will need all the organic matter you can get. Here is a link that might be useful: Lasagna Gardening 101

I've grown a few different cover crops and I don't till. Here is what I learned. Low growing white clover, grew beautifuly with irrigation and in a hot/dry climate, can be killed by drying it out. Not easy to cultivate through the thick growth though. Nitrogen fixing. Buckwheat, can be killed off by mowing when it goes to flower or by frost. Easy to cultivate through, great for beneficial bees and wasps. Not Nitrogen fixing. Oats, frost seemed to kill it but some if it did manage to re-seed itself. not too bad to cultivate through. Not Nitrogen fixing. Winter Wheat. We waited till it flowered and then weed whacked it down. Very little grew back. Kinda like cultivating through grass roots but not too bad. Not nitrogen fixing. Spring wheat, we planted it at the wrong time of year and it didn't really flower so was much harder to kill by weed whacking. Finally pulled up the clumps and flipped them roots to the sky. Still kinda weedy and difficult to cultivate through the clumps. Not Nitrogen Fixing. All these trials took place in Central Florida. All beds were built as lasagna beds over cardboard with lots of mulch, mushroom compost, and compost over them. Each bed was fitted with micro sprinklers. Each bed was 100 SF. Cover crops were planted in the fall. We did get a couple hard freezes that winter, it is now the following summer. This past spring I left the spring wheat bed fallow. The winter wheat bed grew wonderful sunflowers, soy beans, and we are still harvesting squash and zucchini from it. The buckwheat bed was planted with pumpkins and underplanted with the white clover as living mulch. The pumpkins didn't do that great but I've not yet had much luck with pumpkins down here. The Oat bed was planted with sunflowers that did great. Had been underplanted with peanuts but a garden helper pulled most of them out thinking they were weeds. The clover bed I tried planting corn in but I think an irrigation malfunction may have doomed that, the corn failed miserably. I left that bed to dry out over late spring early summer and hopefully kill off most of the clover. The bed is now planted with winter squash, seedlings just coming up. Good Luck in your search and I hope to hear what you try and how it works for you, how you kill it and how the hand cultivation goes through the stubble. Here is a link that might be useful: TCLynx

C'mon....let's get sensible here! No one said anything about adding rocks to the soil, only dealing with them where they naturally exist. In my area, glacial till is the most common soil type and it is a combination of a rocky, sandy, clayey soil usually devoid of much organic matter. But drains really well.....simply because of the gravelly, sandy presence. Attempting to remove ALL the small rocks from any planting beds would take you the rest of your lifetime! And what a wasted effort! The smaller ones are easy enough to work around without issue and when a planting bed is properly mulched, they have vanished from sight. Easy-peasy!! If there were no place for rocks and pebbles in the garden, where would we be with respect to alpine, scree or rock gardens?.....some of the most beautiful gardens are those created out of difficult conditions using plants ideally suited to those conditions, including many dry or xeriscape gardens. Let's not be quite so narrow minded about what constitutes suitable gardening conditions. Not everyone wants or even desires perfection. And it is always preferable to take advantage of the situation you have on hand rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. FWIW, peat moss is generally listed pretty low on the list of recommended soil amendments for any number of reasons, discussions about its sustainability being only one. That is a very old school approach to soil amending.