51% sand?! You need lots of compost to be fertile and retain moisture, a raised bed is another option.

I agree with Ingrid about Julia Child, I have one and she does well in the heat. St Patrick is another one, it was bred in San Bernadino. JC puts out a lot of flowers but they aren't really vase friendly, the shrub looks nice though. SP has a perfect flower(grandiflora) for the vase but he grows spindly.

Sandy clay loam is an excellent soil type for roses. Count your blessings. Don't create deep rose holes filled with a mix different from the surround, but just till some manure or compost into the topsoil throughout the planting area.

I've had my garden soil professionally analyzed by two soil testing labs. Here are some of the results (see note below).

(I tried to present the results side-by-side but gardenweb kept deleting the tabs and extra spaces)

=============================

Tested in 2002

Soil test lab Earthco

pH 6.9

Organic Matter 2.8%

USDA Soil type Sandy Clay Loam

Sand 60%

Silt 20%

Clay 20%

=============================

Tested in 2015

Soil test lab UMASS

pH 7.1

Organic Matter 6.9%

USDA Soil type Sandy Clay Loam

Sand 51%

Silt 31%

Clay 18%

=====================

Note: The 2015 results may not be accurate (especially for macro- and micro-nutrients) so I'm having another lab test the soil. I'll post those results when I get them back about April 15th.

Well it looks like your soil is getting better over the years, more silt and less sand. Your organic matter is also up which is good. You must live on an old alluvial plain, perhaps near the mountains.

My home is in Riverside California which is (as the crow flies) 49 miles west of downtown Los Angeles.

The elevation of my home is 869 feet above sea level.

Riverside is in a valley so its native soil are alluvial deposits from the San Bernardino Mountains (21 miles north of my house) and from the Box Springs Mountains (9 miles east of my house).

My home is 4 1/2 miles south of the Santa Ana River [which has no or little water, except after rains (Ha! Ha!)]. We're in the fourth year of the worst drought in California's history.

Riverside's normal annual rainfall is 10.2 inches but, since October, we've had only about 3 inches of rain (and it's entering the dry season)

Average Temperatures: January, 55.0° F; July, 79.0° F
Record temperatures: 17° F to 114° F

The difference in sand content is surely just an artifact of the sampling. I don't think that mixture would drain excessively fast--does it?

Hi Gary! You don't need to change a thing about your soil texture with traditional amendments. Really, the only thing your soil is probably going to "need" is a nutrient adjustment and over time your texture will take care of itself. I don't remember if you plant a cover crop or if you are harvesting year round. Either way, a year round cover crop is your best bet (less expensive, less work, way more bang for your soil health buck) to increase soil O.M once your nutrients are on their way to being balanced. :-) I wish I had figured that out long ago instead of mulching our gardens and dealing with a bunch of material that wasted time and money for very little benefit.

My garden contains roses with a 4-inch layer of bark chips (no cover crop or groundcover)

Gary ....

You may want to look into permaculture concepts for improving your soil ... similar to what soilhugger541 has suggested above. Here are a couple of links to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

http://www.soilfoodweb.com/Article.html

I have a no-till garden and when I started this garden there was zero percent organic material in the gardening area as the house pad was cut out of a slope created by glacier moraine. In essence it could be called subsoil as the cut put the gardening level four feet under where top of the slope would have run naturally.

The "soil" consisted of tightly compressed small stones, about the size of a marble and clay and silt. I couldn't even dig in it with a pick unless I had wet it down the night before.

The soil was dead. No earth worms, no weeds, no soil activity because it had also been covered with weed barrier and rocks.

I just mulched the beds with organic material twice a year and now I have lots of worms and active soil. I can dig in any of the beds with a trowel.

Using no-till techniques will improve your soil.

Lyn

I

Correction: My 400 sq. ft. garden USED to have a gazania groundcover, about 25 roses, several other shrubs, a 3-year-old flowering plum tree and BILLIONS of ever-recurring weeds (primarily black medic and common groundsel).

In mid-January, I ripped out all of the gazanias, diligently pulled the weeds and planted 6 bareroot roses (4 did not produce any leaves and their canes soon turned brown/black) so I replaced them with 2 new bareroot roses (which are doing fine).

Once I get the soil "right", I need to re-weed (because BILLIONS of new weeds have emerged since mid-January) then apply a pre-emergent (to kill any new weeds), relocate some of the roses (so they're spaced better) and apply a 4-inch-deep layer of bark mulch.

Hey Gary, I never asked you where you picked up the bare roots roses and what varieties? :-) What did you do with all of the roots/stumps from the previous plants?

Hi soilhugger541,

Three Ch-Ching! grandliflora roses were ordered from edmundsroses.com. ( When I contacted edmunds, I mentioned only two roses and they replaced them).

The I-can't-remember-what-variety -- the tag fell off -- hybrid tea rose was bought at Lowes Home Improvement Store.

I moved the 4 dead root/stumps to a more inconspicuous section of the garden to see if they would eventually grow but they haven't. They're still in the soil.

I have a big bone to pick with soil tests when they tell you the "soil type" of your soil in a residential setting. A few years back I lived on the eastern side of my state & now I live on the western side of my state. At both locations I tested my soils & received a report that said I had "loam" with very similar compositions. Yet when I dug fence post holes at each location I found 2 extremely different soils. My eastern garden had sticky red clay starting 12' down & that lawn had terrible poor drainage problems in low areas after a rainy spell, sometimes standing water for several days. Post holes in my western garden revealed pure sand at 12" & deeper. No matter how hard it rains here, I & the neighbors never have standing water 30 minutes after the rain stops. The reason for this is that most homes have truck loads of black loam hauled in so your house can have a nice lawn. This is frequently the soil that home owners are testing for their gardens. I strongly encourage you to dig some deeper holes to determine what's underneath the top 4-8" of your lawn. These deeper soils will have an impact on water, organic & nutrient holding capacities and your pH.

Hi wirosarian_z4b_WI,

I removed the top several inches of soil so the sample I sent to the lab was from 4-8 inches deep.

When I bought my condo new in 1972, the flower bed (in the common-area) was 25 feet long by 2 feet wide (50 square feet). Over the years, I've expanded the flower bed into the common-area lawn so the flower bed is now 25 feet long by 18 feet wide (almost 400 square feet).

The condo board said it's OK that the expanded garden is in the common-area but I'm responsible for maintaining the garden (i.e., prune and fertilize the shrubs, weed the garden, etc). The watering is still done by the common-area sprinklers.