Soil test says there are no heavy metal contamination problems, a PH of 6.5, and though all of the micronutrients are at the low-ish level, the only one below normal is Manganese.

Macro nutrients: N - nonexistant
P - low (4)
K - even lower than low (24),
Calcuim, Low (292) and
Magnesium, between high and v. high (150)

CEC is 2.0 Meq/100 g
Extracable aluminun 6 ppm (soil range 10 - 250ppm) (is this good or bad, to be below range with aluminun?)

The soil is not just sandy, it is SAND. (three lots from the ocean). Grass and bushes grow fine, along with some nice ground covers and honeysuckle. People say fig trees and rosemary grow especially well, so he is planting these. A neighbor down the street grew tomatoes and peppers last year by adding bags of "soil" over top of the sand.

Last fall my friend buried some kitchen scraps and planted some cabbage seedlings over top of this. This spring they are small and edible, BUT almost completely tasteless. (at least they're not bitter.)

He wants a very small garden, in addition to the fig and rosemary -- maybe 4x4 or 4x8.

I've just looked through the ammendments sold to him at the garden store --two bags containing peat, pine bark, composted manure, and lime. A couple boxes of organic fertilizer, one of which contains: feather meal, meat and bone meal, blood meal, sulfate of potash. The other contains: fish bone meal, feather meal, kelp meal, alfalfa meal, soft rock phosphate, fish meal, mined potassium sulfate and seaweed extract, and says it has pro-=biotic soil microbes plus mycorrhizae.

I've just been reading the threads about peat and bagged mixes -- don't want to wreck anything with these things, yet it seems that the sand here won't grow great veggies if it doesn't have help.

Will these ammendments correct the micronutrient imbalance? Does he need a source of calcium without magnesium to balance that out? Is it okay to add the mix that has peat in it? What would you fill a raised bed with, since pretty much all the mixes at the store have peat and pine bark?

Would you add the peat mix, along with the fertilizers when planting the fig?

Oh -- and there are no earthworms. Could we still just lay additives on top (use no dig) if there is no one in the soil to mix things in?

Any advice will be much appreciated!
Thanks!

Now, years and lots of compost later, there are worms in this bed. Maybe it will just take years (and compost) to make this very sandy soil worth anything. At least we know it grows tasteless cabbage :)

Thanks, blazeaglory -- so we'll put in everything he bought, and start a compost pile. I wonder if the worms they sell for fishing woiuld work?

I would be willing to bet that many if not most crops will grow well on the sand in a very heavy mulch of seaweed. Potatoes were often grown that way, and the vigor of the seed potato lends itself to the method. Tiny-seeded crops will be much more difficult. Stick with big seeds: potato, corn (maybe after the sand has been well built up with seaweed compost), beans. Too late for potatoes now in NC, go for bush beans which will tolerate wind better than trellised beans. Cowpeas as well.

Avoiding peat and/or bagged mixes may apply for container gardening, but it your situation they're perfectly acceptable. In fact, you'll need all the organic matter you can muster - and then some. However, in the quantities you require, bagged mixes will get expensive. Best to buy pine bark fines, spaghnum peat and manure in bulk, if you can find it.

For a small vegetable bed I would build a frame out of 2 x 12 lumber. Excavate the sand within the proposed bed to a depth of 12". Then start piling in the organic matter - shredded pine bark, manure, peat moss, compost, etc. Incorporate this with the sand in the bottom of the excavation and then keep adding stuff and incorporating until you have built-up the soil level to near the top of the frame.

It's great that you got a soil test, but it will not really apply to the bed since it will be so heavily amended. For the first season, I'd add dolomite lime at a rate of 5 lbs. per 100 sq. ft. For the fertilizer, I'd apply it at twice the recommended rate and work it into the soil a full 12". This, with the addition of some side dressing throughout the growing season, should grow good vegetables. At the end of the season, get another soil test. This will guide you in future amendments.

The beds will require annual additions of compost or other organic matter as sand has an unending capacity to digest whatever you add. For a little more durability, I would add a hundred pounds of Turface along with the organic amendments. This is a calcined clay product which has very good nutrient and water-holding characteristics and which will last for many years. You can Another thing that I do annually is plant a cover crop of winter rye and hairy vetch. Planted in the fall, it will grow slowly throughout the winter and then can be plowed under in the spring prior to planting. It's an excellent source of organic matter and nutrients.

Sand is at once a curse and a blessing. It's very difficult to get into shape, but once you have, it's really an excellent growing medium.

Is it okay to add dolomitic lime if the ph is already 6.5? I guess that would ammend the calcium deficiency, right?

I think I actually found hairy vetch already growing in the yard, so I know it will grow here.

Another note of encouragement -- tonight I made an amazing cole slaw with the very mild cabbage by adding mayo, yogurt, lemon, onion, sugar, medjool dates, pistachios, and clementines. Yum.

It's exciting to think that by adding lots of OM this could actually become a good garden. I like epic struggles. :)

One thing to be aware of is the CEC number on your soil test. It stands for cation exchange capacity. Without getting too scientific, CEC is a way of quantifying "how much" (in the way of nutrients) your soil can hold. As you might expect, a CEC of 2.0 is extremely low. Sand has almost no capacity to hold nutrients. On the bright side, with a low CEC, nutrient values can be changed quickly. So, even though your test shows "high" magnesium, that will change with the addition of organic matter. Based on my experience, peat and pine bark together are a) low in calcium and magnesium; and, b) low pH. So, the addition of dolomitic lime will help on both counts.

If rosemary is happy I should imagine that bay, sage, oregano and thyme would be too. Bay trees have naturalised on the coast here.

Good advice here and I have little to add. I second the advice not to bother trying to add worms. If conditions are right they will come anyway, if not any worms you add will leave or die. If you're bringing in composted manure and such you'll eventually get some worms or worm eggs and they'll take up residence.

Organic matter, more and more. Is there a Starbucks around?

A bay leaf tree? Now, that would be cool. I'll only get to see this place spring, and fall, but it will be fun to see how it develops.

The neighbor who grows tomatoes and peppers said "There tends to be a lot of organic matter in the soil" But when I dig, I see SAND and that's all. (except for a layer of darker sand right at the root zone of the grass -- which might be from a sod farm, since grass doesn't grow here without a lot of help.)

Starbucks . . . I think this island is one of the last places in the US with no chains, but there are coffee shops, so that's a great idea. (and okay, there is one Food Lion)

We built a little 4 X 4 raised bed yesterday -- now to fill it with eel grass, manure, anything we can find!

A few too many GRM (God references per minute) for my tastes, but a good video nonetheless.

I can get fresh wood chips (though may have to pay for large quantities since I'm not convenient for the big tree services to come dump), also have this 40-yr old manure - wouldn't that be just as good as the wood chips (or would decomposed wood chips have more N)?

If you watch the whole video, you see that it does not work when people incorporate the chips into the soil (I would think it ties up the N). Also, one of the test gardens failed miserably because the people didn't plant deep enough. Still, it worked in the second test garden (in the desert) , and the guy who originated it gets great results.

budbasket , if you'd like to keep us posted about your progress with this method, please join in the BTE experiment. There are a couple of us doing this method experimentally this year and we'll post photos. I've got a small BTE plot at my own garden in West Virginia. I'd never dump wood chips into my main garden -- I just happened to have an area already covered in 4 year old chips, so I decided to experiment--plant the same things on the same day and watch progress and results.

As kimmr pointed out, there's no "secret" to the system. It's simply consistent addition of copious amount of organic matter. I would add two that, since the wood chips (and I'm assuming a preponderance of conifer wood chips in Gautschi's situation) are very slow to decompose, they provide a better source of OM than some other options. Also, I would guess that the lignins and other chemical components of conifer bark would result in a high level of pure humus once it's fully decomposed.

Yep -- we're up in the mountains in WV near Canaan Valley, about 3K feet. Average 150 - 200 inches of snow a year. I can drive 12 miles down the mountain and be in zone 6.