Getting rid of bad soil/improving soil

I have mostly sand soil, and sometimes get rid of portions of bad soil, by putting it back into nature somewhere. Then I mix the remaining soil with compost and bagged good soil.

I have heard people say, I can't add compost, I have too much soil already.

This is only good for areas with virgin soil. Once the soil gets better, I don't remove it, but I sometimes add it back into a compost bin to make room for more compost added to the soil.

In general, the nearer one is to the beach, the worse the sand soil becomes. Some people do it big scale removing huge amounts of bad soil and bringing in good soil by the truck load.

Anyway, this has improved my garden over all, I can now keep alive plants that would have died in the past. Nothing else has made the kind of progress for my gardening as soil improvement.

Have you ever read about the lasagna gardening method?

We urban California gardeners can't easily use the 'lasagne gardening' method (which is really the old Ruth Stout process) because our lots are so small. In SF, a level city lot averages 25x100' (some are smaller!) and will cost you $200,000 -- WITHOUT a house on it! I live across the Bay so our lots are a little bigger, but even so, we don't have the space to spare, either. BugGirl's got sand, we've got clay, and both are easier to just haul off and dump somewhere, replacing it with good soil or compost instead. That's one thing about a small garden, at least -- you can buy container plants and soil in bags without spending a fortune.

On an environmental note, soil removed from any garden or cultivated space shouldn't be dumped 'back into nature'. Too many seeds, pests and mirco-organisms that could cause wildlife problems in the future. We're lucky in the UK we can take it to a recycling centre that has a garden waste facility, the garden waste is them composted in huge piles, then bagged and sold back to the gardener at a very low cost

Jkom51, it just goes to show the differences between regions, here our average gardens are much smaller that 25'X100' *G* Where I garden is 40'X60' (just 100 sqft less than 25x100) and that is considered quite a good size, my own patch of weeds out the back here is less than 20'X20'! I don't understand why you can't garden in the Ruth Stout way (it's not popular here anyway), I would have thought it to be much easier to do that in a smaller garden?

I'm with you, Baa. Lasagne gardening is much easier on small patches, because you can obtain the needed materials in enough quantity.

Bug Girl: I'm really confused by one of your comments. How can you have too much soil?

Sorry, didn't mean to confuse folks. When I said a lot size in San Francisco is 25x100', that means before you put the house atop it! Since an average house is 25'x50', by the time you add the front sidewalk, your gardening area is very, very tiny. You usually have a little patch in the front (don't forget, you have the entryway and the front door to deal with), just enough for one or two medium-sized shrubs and two or three small plants. Often there's no area to plant at all in the front, it's all concreted over.

In the backyard you have (usually) stairs or a small patio, further reducing your space. When you're looking at a 25x10' planting area, it seems a waste of time to wait months for 'lasagne' gardening, when you can just buy a few bags of compost and start planting immediately. As for 'dumping', around here you'd have to go an awfully long way before finding a 'natural' area you might hurt.

In fact, I can't think of anyplace in SF that would qualify as 'natural'. If BugGirl lives on sand, then she probably lives where they used to have pig farms around the turn of the century, because nothing would grow on the salty sand dunes so it was useless for farming. SF is only 150 years old, when you come right down to it, and like most Western towns has burned down several times. Anything that grows here, grows on soil that was brought in from somewhere else, because what wasn't sand, used to be marshland.

Bug Girl--you may want to try Cole Hardware and see if they carry benefical nemetodes,worm casting,alfala and VF-11 fertilizer. If you apply material to feed the microorganisms in the soil it will really help. I use only organic products here in TX. During our hottest summer months when the Temps are above 100 and the heat index is 120+ I can get away without watering for 3-4 weeks. I have all rainwater at my house(40,000 gallon Tank)so I have to conserve.