ibuzzard - yes, constantly adding organic matter after harvest before the next crop. To speed things up bring in a lot of organic matter as manure + bedding to compost in piles set aside from the current gardening beds. Then after harvest rake those on to the beds if you let some lay fallow or put what is crumbling & dark brown on beds you plan to replant right away. It takes awhile to build enough compost to cover all the beds at all times, but with diligence you can do it. The small animal manures like chicken & rabbits are potent, but not the quantity you'd need. Get a hold of some horse manures and you'll be able to speed up the process. Ten years of using chicken, duck & rabbit manures from our backyard animals (Plus liberal amounts of used coffee grounds + shredded leaves mown over on the lawn in fall. Plus our kitchen waste compost bin contents.)... didn't up the soil organic matter content as much as when we started adding horse manure as well composting first in piles or spreading in fall on fallow beds. Volume made a huge difference though I was quite skeptical in the beginning, afraid of weeds & then learned about the herbicide residue in some hay fed to livestock. I made sure we used manure from horses fed alfalfa hay instead. Now after at least 3 years of horse manures we no longer need 6-12 inches of it added in the fall to break down. The soil is light, fluffy and diggable with hands rather than pickaxe like before.

Ok, thought maybe you'd say that, Rosemary. All I can recommend in that case would be to by all means delineate "beds" or whatever you want to call them under the ones where no such removal is practiced, it being of no practical benefit there...and to use whatever tool-rake, blower, unemployed youth, to remove-but utilize-the ones on (I think) your lawn areas. This is a useful material. I don't know if you know it, but "pine straw" is sold for real money down your way. Me, I'd think of a way to use it, even if just as an ingredient in a large composting setup. That's at least not wasting it. As for hating pines and living in sand country, there is an issue there, one which I can't remedy. Those are the very plants most well-adapted to your area, and as such deserve a place, far more so than all the feeble little items that must be babied along. I see the same thing or the same mentality in place in S. Florida...folks flock to that area and immediately want it changed utterly from what it is/was. Actually, the developers take care of all that ahead of time, piling all that native garbage (satire alert) up to be chipped and blown into a van (semi trailer) to be hauled off. Then, a bunch of stuff requiring endless irrigation gets placed around the shiny new homes and the table is set for yet more groundwater depletion and all the rest. +om

Check out http://www.turfprousa.com/lawn_and_garden_prodcuts.html they have liduid Turf Pro to add microelements, beneficial fungi and bacteria, etc. into the soil to the roots, it is not a fertilizer, it is soil amendment. Exclusively beneficial for turf and all plants as well, it could be sprayed to any plant. Their web explains everything. You may want to apply it now, and then in fall-winter, when your grass become brown, mow it short and cover with thin layer of compost (~1/4") like topdressing, distributing with a flat side of a rake. Good luck!

I garden in a very similar soil type and have found the greggii/microphylla and hybrids extremely useful. They are tough enough to survive in a bed that is far beyond the reach of the hose, which is where I grow many of mine. Why wait until fall, it is still firmly planting time especially if you can water your plants for the first month or so. Rich also gave me advice on slow release fertilizer when I originally planted the bed 4 years ago. Last year I didn't fertilize as an experiment and the plants were smaller. Another thing you might want to do which goes against the usual advice on salvias is to plant them deep. It isn't something one would want to do in heavier soil, but the method has proved useful to me for winter survival and water retention.