I'm in the same 'boat' as you are. We have sand, sand and more sand. Heck...we couldn't even grow grass until we had topsoil brought in...ughh!!! Assuming that your container soil is basically peat with some perlite and vermiculite, why not try layering that in the area that you will growing in next year with some newspapers, manure, leaves, compost...anything that will breakdown over the winter. In the gardening book, "Lasagna Gardening", this is precisely what the author does. She 'creates' good soil, by adding organics and then letting the whole pile just decompose. Come Spring, she just pokes holes in the now compacted pile and puts in the plants or seeds. As far as the bugs go, unless you have brutal winters that can kill them, they'll probably just overwinter and reappear next year. Sorry... I'm not an expert by any means, but your post reminded me of why I choose container gardening over in-ground gardening. Well...that and the fact that my entire property is on a slope ;-) I hope others will be along to help you. Donna H.

Does the bag say that it is weed free or sterilized? Since you said you you bought soil, not compost, it probably already contained the weed seeds. Organic doesn't mean sterile. The onions should be fine if you keep the weeds pulled out when they are small. Sandy

We planted tomatoes in "earth pots" that we made using Home Depot 5 gallon buckets and for other plants used plastic bins. We got the idea online. We drilled holes in the bottom of the bucket and took cotton clothesline from Dollar General, cut it into lengths and pushed them through the holes. We knotted the ends so they wouldn't fall out. Sat a brick in the bottom of another bucket that had drain holes drilled into it around the sides at a certain height and then sat the first bucket into it. Filled it with a mix of Jungle Soil and garden soil. Tomatoes went nuts! One place to see directions is www.instructables.com Hope this helps! Good luck! Val

Last year I purchased 9 (20 Gal) Smart pots/bags to grow tomatoes, 4 of them I used myself and the rest went to friends and family. I am no expert and only a 3 year old tomato grower but they did great. Especialy with last summer. I used 5-1-1 potting mix that I made (you can find it on the container forum). But I highly recomend these bags if you want to grow in containers. I watered them about every 3 days unless it rained and I fertilized with MG water soluble mix about once every 10 days. I think the bags cost about $10 per piece last year and they are said to last about 3-5 years. I only filled the mixture up to 3/4's due to lack of funds, btu they are huge and I love the advantage how you can move them around. The photo below is from (July 27th 2013) and had plenty of tomatoes until November in the Philadelphia area Zone. This year I am using MG Potting mix in 4-5 of them bags and the rest using last years 5-1-1 mix with added Pine bark/perlite and lime and maybe some more peat moss. I am new to this but think it would be a great experiment on which mix works best. I will post more photos this evening or tommorrow to show progress. Also by the way last year plants in the photo were Rutger's Ramapo F-1 and a 4th of July. l.