Have you looked into Hugelkulture? I would be concerned about adding sand. It is always a big debate over on the soil forum, but to me feeding the soil always has to be better than adding sand. I'm not sure where you live in OK, but well drained can quickly become very thirsty beds.

I built a bed with a deep base of wood chips one year. I had never heard of hugelkulture, but it did make a really great bed. I added tons of used coffee grounds, covered it over with a layer of dirt and made soil pockets wherever I want to put a plant.

I decided to delete my original post about my experience since it is inevitably followed with warnings and tales of disaster etc. The best course would be to experiment with your own situation in a small area to test for yourself, its a matter of %'s and common sense no matter what you are growing, good soil texture is a mix of various size particles and made up of sand, silt and clay.

I think sand can work with some kinds of clay, but it depends on what you're growing in that soil, and it depends on what your clay is like in the first place. As Lisa points out, this is always a hot topic on the Soil, Compost and Mulch Forum.

We have all kinds of clay on our property, which is rural acreage. Around the house we have dense, compacted, extremely red clay that is just horrible. In the back yard, we have a sandy-clayey blend that drains much better and in which most everything will grow well most of the time. A few plants get unhappy in the rainiest of years, but they generally survive.

In the area where the front veggie garden grows, we have native sand with a lot of silt at one end of the garden, and dense, compacted reddish-brown clay at the other end. I've amended that clay soil heavily every year since 1999 with lots of organic matter and a small amount of sand, and it finally is turning into the soil I want, but it has been a long road. I've amended the sandy-silty soil with regular additions of organic matter too, but not nearly as much as is needed to amend the native sandy-silty soil.

Despite all the amending, I grow my most important vegetables in raised beds that are are 4 to 8" above grade level. The raised beds are important in wet years when the clay (even well-amended clay) stays too wet during periods of heavy rainfall. Some veggies (root crops) now must be grown only in taller (16-20" tall) raised beds lined with quarter-inch hardware cloth in order to exclude the voles who love to dig tunnels through sandy soil and well-amended clay and eat many root crops, as well as the roots of lots of ornamentals, herbs, veggies, trees and shrubs. We didn't have the vole problem until we'd been here about 11 or 12 years and the soil had greatly improved.

Sand, as Texas Ranger's experience proves, can work in some situations, but it can be problematic when you are growing certain vegetables, such as tomatoes and onions, both of which are highly susceptible to root-knot nematodes. When you attempt to raise nematode-susceptible vegetables in soil that has a high sand content, you often find that nematode issues develop. Many of my friends here in our county who have native sand have to fight nematodes tooth and nail and some of them have either given up gardening completely or have switched to container gardening. So, keep that in mind when you bring in sand----too much sand can mean too many nematodes. I don't know how much of an issue nematodes are with ornamental plants, but they certainly are hard on some edible plants, particular tomatoes, peppers and onions. There are some nematode-tolerant varieties of tomatoes and peppers, but even they are only tolerant to nematodes and not totally resistant.

I like Lisa's hugelkultur suggestion. I used it in Fort Worth with black gumbo clay, which was wonderfully fertile once you added organic matter to it to fix the drainage and stickiness. I have not used it quite as much here because we already have a major issue with venomous snakes since we are so close to the Red River in such a, um, wild type of area, and I have found snakes inhabit my hugelkulture piles, which in the past I have mostly used to fix badly eroded areas, for which it is the perfect solution. Lately I've been experimenting with using hugelkultur to fill in low spots, including our former lily pond which stopped being enjoyable when water moccasins moved into it for 3 or 4 straight drought years. I've already had snake issues in the not-yet-completed hugelkultur this year so I need to hurry up and finish that area before even more snakes attempt to move into it to live. One issue with hugelkultur, though, is whether you have readily available materials to use. If you do, it is easy. If you don't, the lack of available materials makes it more difficult. We have an old woodland with some aging trees that need to be taken down before they fall on someone, so we have a plentiful supply of hugelkultur material. One drawback is that our woods are heavily populated with timber rattlers and other venomous snakes, so we only go into the woods to drag out the tree trunks and limbs during the snake-free season, which runs roughly from November or December through March or sometimes April. Any hugelkulture building I do is accomplished only when the odds of encountering venomous snakes is very low.

Simply building raised beds atop amended clay might be all you need to do. It is hard to say since we cannot see or feel your soil to examine its tilth. I am not opposed to the idea of adding sand to clay as long as you also add organic matter. I added both sand and organic matter either the first year, but haven't added any sand since. I add organic matter continually. When you're growing an edible garden, the plants need the nutrients from the organic matter and they need its water-holding and drainage qualities as well.

You didn't mention what color your clay is, but I know from experience that most red and black clays are mineral-rich and make great garden soils once you fix the drainage issues by adding organic matter and, if desired, sand. If you are dealing with yellow or gray clay, my limited experience with it is that it would be easier to build raised beds and fill them with an imported mix from someplace like Minick's.

You can Google and read all about Hugelkultur. Here's one article linked below to get you started.

Hugelkultur

Texas Ranger...there are many people who swear by adding sand in large amounts. ..and I seem to recall that coarse sand is a lot better if you have the choice.

I was not aware there was a soil forum. I Google searched this before I posted here, and I found opinion all across the board, I see why its a " hot " topic . But I really want to hear from local people, who've done this in soil in central Oklahoma.

I saw a show on hegelkultur on OETA last summer, and I can't recall the name of the show, it no longer airs, it was about improving land. And I don't think that's for me. Guy on the show, also had to run the snakes out of his hegelkultur pile.

I think my soil is a black gumbo, I just took a pic and will post it, I'm hoping the morning sun did not bleach out the colors ......

Another pic, not much better

The soil forum is full of interesting information. It is my second favorite forum :) Well, except when butterflies are active, then the butterfly forum is my 2nd favorite! But the Oklahoma forum is always my favorite!

Gardenweb Forums

Your soil looks really nice to me. I don't see a speck of our red clay :) Texas Ranger has a good point, you could experiment, try adding sand in a "test plot" and see what you think.

This looks like the soil in the worst part of my garden. It's where the rainwater isn't able to soak in, but washes away. I'm solving that problem with hugels and grading. The other solution is to mulch, mulch, mulch. If I don't the sun and the wind destroy the organic material and moisture before the life forms in the soil have a chance to perform their magic. But I'm finding I really need a foot of mulch ! it makes a huge difference. I think it's because I'm so windy on average.

My solution to you would be to plant daikon radishes late summer and seed in giant mustard in the fall. The daikons grow up to 2 feet deep and 2-3" wide. It will kill off when it gets cold leaving behind instant compost in the soil. The mustard will last longer and provide organic material on top of the soil when it dies as well as act like a mulch. Giant mustard has an excellent rejuvenating root system. You can till everything in the spring, if you want. If you don't mulch, you'll need to continue working real hard at bringing in materials to help compensate. This is my opinion. I am in central OK and we have some very nice weather to work with outside of drought. I'm finding it important to mulch to protect that goodness during the extreme months.

I don't mean to confuse you. I didn't write this clearly. If you build hugels, you don't need to do anything else. You won't even need to water regularly. This has been my experience. The hugels work because the sun and wind cannot destroy the decomposition process. Mulch works the same, but not as well.

This is one of the tamer "add sand?" threads. The Soil forum can get a little rowdy sometimes :) I think a lot of the thread will echo Texas Ranger's thoughts. Over the years, my basic takeaway from the many discussions is, if you add sand, add A LOT.
Sharp Coarse Sand to Amend Clay?

Lisa, I'm probably overly sensitive since I have been on the receiving end of quite a bit of close-minded, aggressively hostile and know it all pedantic crud on GW over the years on the subject of adding sand (GADS!) when all I'm doing is reporting my own experience, not giving advice necessarily. I hesitated to even post at all knowing someone would inevitably put some comment in to the contrary making adding sand look stupid, ignorant, ill informed or that a person is just lucky if some major catastrophe didn't occur as a result. Its just sand for crying out loud, not some alien substance like weed cloth for example which I can certainly rant and tell some horror stories about and which got recommended just the other day here but I kept quiet.

By the way, my uncle Claude used to grow Black Diamond watermelon in sandy soil and he sold them by the truck load each summer.

Actually I hate working with clay soil, I mean I REALLY HATE IT. There, its out, I've said it. I also had a large dump truck load of river bottom top soil brought in with which I made three large hills and I laid in a thick layer of sand under them to help drain and build it up, crap clay is buried out of sight and mind way underneath these now. I've done more dirt hauling and sand hauling than anyone else around here. It was all well worth the effort and I no longer steal leaves and grass cuttings along the street trying to fix that blasted clay.

Nothing wrong with that, tex. I'll be the first to admit that what works best is that which I'm willing to DO.

well, coup, I looked up that hegel deal and there is no way I'd do that. My husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday that one year and I said I wanted a big pile of sand, a whole truck load. One pile led to two and then I found myself looking lustfully at piles of sand anytime someone was fixing something in the city and feeling envious because a body just can't have too much sand in my opinion and I have a whole west side I'd love to add a lot of sand to also. That crud is still the original red clay (amended to no avail, it just laffs at that) and its the difference between chicken soup and chicken poop from the areas I added sand to.

Lisa, you are right, the amount added matters. I can't quote it and sound like a professor but you WILL get concrete adding a small amount to clay, something about the smaller particles etc etc etc---too boring for me to get memorized well enough to pontificate about it---which is why I stay off the Soil Forum by the way since I don't like being pontificated to by long winded experts.

I do suspect that many of the people who preach against adding sand have never actually done it on any kind of real scale to test it out, they are just repeating what they read or using one situation to draw from. I still say experiment and see what happens in one test area or learn to love clay.

I really had no idea this was a controversial subject.

But I will probably bring some sand in next fall.

Too late this year, I planted tomatoes today.

LC, the soil forum has definite opinions...and apparently we all do too :)

I am a huge fan of composting, not that I actually use it all that much, but because I cannot fathom sending compostable stuff to a landfill to be buried forever when I can add to the ecosystem in my yard. I tried a worm bin....after the worm escapees and the soldier flies, nope, it needs to stay in my yard! I flower garden for the most part. I moved my compost pile a year or two ago to remediate a difficult corner in my yard (took a 50 year old tree out). I did grow a fantastic flower garden in the old compost bed. It's bursting alive with poppies at the moment.

Texas Ranger, you are here in OKC? me too.

Taking out a 50 year old tree sounds like a good way to improve a corner in my opinion. I'm always looking for ways to get more sun in but the neighbors love trees.

Yes, I'm in OKC too. I first got slathered on the sand issue on the O. Grass Forum when I blurted out that I'd added a lot of sand, the topic wasn't even on soil but thats when I learned from a guy in North Carolina that to make soil concrete--you simply add any amount of sand to clay and presto, you have instant concrete, no exceptions to the rule. How was I to know, dumb Okie that I am? The damage was already done here at my place except so far I've yet to see concrete or any bad effect, just the opposite in fact.

People are very sensitive about their own dirt I discovered, but I suspect its probably often more about hubris and ego than soil.

icdollar, 6 inches spread on top sounds good if you dig that in and add some organic. You still might want to experiment on a spot to see how it does in your particular situation.

It was a silver maple tree, planted under the utility lines. I was never so happy as the day I had it taken down. I'm sure OGE is thrilled I had it taken out too :) So, I am waiting for the tree roots and stump to go away. In the meantime the compost pile is working on the dirt! Unfortunately it moved my compost pile out into the view of the neighbors. None of my back neighbors are really outdoors people, but I'm sure they don't love looking at it. In the summer I grow annual vines on the fence, but in the winter, it is just out hangin' out for the world to see.

TexasRanger, I doubt the nematodes are a serious problem for ornamental plants, especially the native types you grow, but they are for many agricultural plants and I know lcdollar is growing an edible garden, so that's why I mentioned nematodes. The folks to my south who have deep sand (roughly 280' deep) in the Thackerville area have gorgeous ornamentals because they grow the types of plants (mostly natives or at least cultivated ornamentals that were bred from natives) that grow well in sand. They also can grow some vegetables (particularly melons and southern peas) that like the sand. Their sand is not the sandy loam found in much of Oklahoma, it is deep river sand that looks almost like beach sand. I am just a few miles north of Thackerville and don't have that deep river sand. In our areas with sand, we have a light brown sandy loam that is heavy on sand and silt, and short on loam, but it isn't at all that beachy sand like Thackerville has. We call their sand "sugar sand" to distinguish it from regular sandy loam type soils found in much of Oklahoma. If someone is trying to grow the wrong kinds of plants (by wrong, I mean not well-adapted to fast-draining sand) in that deep sugar sand, they are in trouble. My friends who have attempted to grow tomatoes and peppers in deep sugar sand have had to wage protracted, unwinnable wars with root-knot nematodes. I always tease them and tell them they need to truck in some clay to mix with their sand, although I doubt anyone really would want to buy clay soil on purpose.

I think your landscape is beautiful and it works for you and fits the architectural style of your home so well. I am sorry if you catch a lot of grief from folks who are adamantly opposed to adding sand. I think you're right on track when you say that a lot of sand must be added. I think most people with dense, slow-draining clay add far too little sand and it does give them even worse soil than the clay they had before because often clay + sand = adobe. Well, for true adobe, I guess they'd have to add straw. I also think that sugar sand works better for edible gardeners when lots of compost is added at the same time because edible plants tend to need the nutrition from the compost and also need soil that drains well but not too well since many vegetable and fruit plants need lots of moisture available consistently in their root zones in order to produce good fruits and vegetables. The first thing I did to improve the very dense red clay around our house was buy one dumptruck load of sand our very first year here. They told us it was topsoil, but it was the worst sugar sand I've ever seen, and I didn't even care, because our clay wasn't going to grow anything we wanted to grow until we did something to fix it. We couldn't really rototill it into the clay because the clay was so dense that even a powerful rear-tine tiller just bounced around on top of the ground, so then we spread hay and straw a foot deep on top of the sand once we had hauled the sand around one wheelbarrow load at a time and raked it out smooth. Since we have strongly sloping property, we wanted to keep the sand from eroding away. Once we had been here 3 or 4 years, we rototilled the sand and compost (the remains of that foot of hay and straw) into the clay and it got a lot better, but since then, the only improvement the lawn area around the house has gotten has been compost layered on top of the ground occasionally.

We still get sand occasionally (but not because we buy a a truck load of it) when it erodes during heavy rainfall from the property directly south of us which still has some sand left, although their sand is slowly becoming our sand with each heavy rainfall. I don't mind their sandy loam washing onto our land---it isn't filled with nematodes because it is on top of clay subsoil---but we got up to 4" of sand washed into our garden in a very heavy rainstorm (12.89" in one day) in April 2009 and my whole garden, including several inches of mulch, was buried under wet sand. There wasn't much I could do about it then, but in the fall and winter, I just rototilled all that sand and the mulch that was underneath it, into the garden soil. While it was frustrating that year to have all that weed seed-filled sand on top of the mulch, it didn't harm the garden too much (though the excess moisture made plant growth stall for a couple of months), but I still have a lot more weed issues in the area that got the 4" of sand so I'm still pulling out those weeds every year when they sprout. Oh, and oddly, the ranch right across the street to our east has a lot of that sugar sand, but the only place we have sugar sand is in our creek bed.....because it washes there from the ranch across the road.

We have a new back garden (new as of a couple of years ago) about 100-120' west of our house that has native sandy-silty loam in about 70% of the area and I like it, but the voles like it as well, so I am having to be careful with what I plant there because the voles devour the roots of everything. I barely saved my Texas lantana from them by digging it up, putting it in a very large container and pruning back the topgrowth very hard to match the root pruning the hungry voles had done. So far, there isn't much the voles won't eat in that back garden's sandy soil, so it is frustrating to plant back there and watch everything die. They eat fruit tree roots, including native persimmons that popped up in that area on their own after we rototilled it, conflower roots, the fig tree roots, etc. Since we have 10+ acres of wooded land filled with pine voles, we'll never be rid of them, so I think the only way I'll be able to use the new back garden for anything permanent in nature will be to make root cages with 1/4" hardware cloth and plant the root balls within the wire cages. Every year the voles eventually, usually in July, start eating the roots of my annual flowers and veggies in that back garden, but usually I've gotten enough of a harvest from the veggies to feel fairly satisfied with the performance of that garden. I thought gardening in native sandy loam would be easier than amending clay endlessly, and it would be, if we didn't have a non-stop population of voles.

An interesting note---in that first year when the voles began eating the roots of everything in the back garden, I frantically dug up everything I could and moved all the plants to the front garden, except for trees (fig and desert willow, which had almost no roots left so I put them in containers and they have recovered). I've never had nematodes in that front garden since it started out as clay, but there must have been nematodes on the roots of something that I dug up that year and moved to a specific raised bed in the front garden because last year one single tomato plant in that bed was covered in nematodes and I raise my own plants so those nematodes weren't brought in from the outside. I so far haven't had nematodes in the back garden as far as I know, but somehow they must have been on a plant I moved from the back to the front in the first Vole War.

lcdollar, Your soil looks like brown clay. Black gumbo clay is as black as night.

I love the way hugelkultur improves the land, but we have a woodland full of deadfall I can collect in winter and use. Most people here in our area clean up their woodlands and pastures and just burn the wood and brush, or they use prescribed burns out on the big ranchlands to accomplish the same thing. I just compost it or use it in limited hugelkulturs. I don't plant much in a hugelkultur that will need to be harvested for the first couple of years because we have so many snakes here near the Red RIver. I wait until it all has decomposed enough that the snakes cannot climb around freely in it. In our earliest years here, I just added big chunks of wood---burying them several inches below the soil surface in the veggie garden. They decomposed in no time at all....a year or two or three....depending on their size and improved the soil as much as anything else I've ever done. When I added big chunks of wood to my raised beds, the old rancher-old farmer crowd about stroked out and couldn't wait to tell me how big of an idiot I was and how wrong I was and how much I'd regret it. In this case, they were wrong and I've never regretted adding the wood. Yes, I know all about how it will tie up nitrogen as it decomposes, but I just added extra nitrogen to accomodate that, and I had this most lush, lovely, productive gardens ever. I still add wood whenever I can.

All I have tried to do with my veggie garden is to turn the soil there into the same soil we have in our woodland areas---that woodland soil comes from decomposing trees, leaves and other plants as well as decomposing animals (wildlife does die, you know, and we don't go in there and bury them) and insects, etc. that fall to the ground and decompose in place. It is the most gorgeous soil, being "built", so to speak, from the top down over the last 50-70 years as the trees grew along the creek and the farmer quit farming that area, and then the woodland expanded and expanded over the decades. If you dig down in the woodland, you find the same horrible red clay we have on most of our property, but it is beneath about a foot of woodland soil. I hope someday that my veggie garden soil is as loamy and rich and dark brownish-black as the woodland soil. It has improved a great deal, but still has a long way to go.

dawn, As you pointed out I don't grow a large vegetable garden, thats true, but I do still successfully grow peppers, tomatoes and basil as needed each summer. I think of that as a utilitarian thing but its not what I'm interested in so that makes me a bit of a sideliner on this forum. Vegetable gardening is the main focus here so I don't contribute much as a result but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I am familiar with sugar sand in parts of Texas and Oklahoma and I did know that root knot nematodes are not indigenous to the SW but have been introduced via infected plants. Oklahoma has a diverse range of soil conditions and that should be remembered before accepting anyones opinion or solution as the correct one elsewhere. If something works for me, I am happy to share it but not as expert advice or a one size fits all despite the fact that I'm not growing vegetables large scale.

BTW, I've been gardening for several decades now and have gone through many changes in plant interests/types of gardens over the years.