His sister lives there now, and we went out to visit. I spent a lot of time checking out the land... and I was struck with a perplexing thought.

From where I was standing and looking at it all, the ground looks like it's pretty much sand. Husband's brother-in-law confirms this, as he just buried his dog out in the back earlier this year. But my husband also says that the ground stays wet - he said when his grandpa grew watermelon out there, he never had to irrigate. He also said when they were digging holes to put in posts for the chicken pen, they didn't have to add water from a hose for the concrete - the hole filled up on its own. How does that work? I didn't think sand held ANY water.

When we move out to this place, what the heck am I going to do as far as gardening? I've only ever had a couple raised beds, but that's because I've only ever lived on hard, thick, nasty, dark, yucky, need-a-pickaxe-to-till-it CLAY. I was KINDA thinking raised beds, but if it's sand, all the moisture would just go straight through my lovely soil mix and into the SAND and float away... So do you do raised beds on SAND, or amend what you have??

And THEN I wondered... how the heck do you get a large amount of soil/compost/whatever you want to add to someplace out in (no offense) the middle of no where?

I know it's years away, but now I'm just curious about what other people do for their gardens, or how you get a couple of cubic yards of whatever to someplace that's an hour away from anywhere... Or how you amend sand.

SAND! There's sand on places other than on the beach... in east TEXAS! I'm still reeling over that one.

All sand is not at the beach, as you have discovered. I live in Utah on very sandy property. I hadn't realized quite how sandy until we excavated for a new home on the same land. They dug up pure sand. We are about 1/4 mile from a seasonal creek. A local farmer told me this area was nothing but one big sand pit before they put in the paved road. He remembers falling off his horse as a kid right in front of where our house is now and wasn't hurt at all because he landed in sand.

My family used to grow some pretty big watermelons in very sandy soil along with their cotton crop (TX panhandle).

So, after 20 years of composting my garden it's pretty good soil, but the rest of the property needs tlc, especially since the sand excavated from our basement is now our future lawn.

What to do? I'm composting right on the sand around the house - fine wood chips from huge elm trees we cut down, shredded cardboard, horse manure, and bags & bags of leaves I've scarfed off freecycle. It's going to take some time, but a small section of that sand is rapidly turning into luscious soil and I just started working on it this week. At first I was going to build a couple more compost piles like I have in my garden, but then decided to compost the soil as I go and decrease the physical labor on my part.

I don't expect to have ground that will support a lawn for a year or two, and then I'll always have the mental picture of the bottomless pit of sand right below the topsoil.

During the trenching excavation, we did discover a very moist layer of topsoil about 4 feet down. Now I understand how my apple trees have survived so well all these years.