Oh my! I would be frustrated too! I don't know if the size of your garden would make this suggestion unworkable but it might be worth a try. If you can get your hands on some large soda bottles or some milk jugs cut the bottoms off and stick the necks deep into the soil. Then fill up the bottles and allow the water to soak down into the soil. Not the most attractive addition to the garden but it would get you past the hard crust.

Let us know if you try this and it works.

Good luck.

I'm probably going to put a bottle into the potato barrel.

The mystery of the thing is that there is no hard crust. Its soft sand.

I can dig it with my fingers -- especially the soft, newly piled stuff around freshly planted seeds and transplants.

Yet once the water moistens the top layer of grains it beads and runs. You can touch it to break the surface tension and that damp layer will part like a broken soap bubble -- exposing bone-dry sand beneath it.

I have had worse soil -- up in the mountains where it was 2 inches deep over rock ledge. But if I could scrape together enough of that for the roots to grow in I could work normally without the need for dams, moats, and adobe work.

you could try and imrpove that a number of ways the best is to add oodles of organic matter and use hay type mulches, you could dissolve clay in water and water that in as well, time consuming and maybe tedius.

i still think i'd suggest raised beds this will give you a quick growing medium but you will have to top up lots at least each season i would be thinking. so you need to be collecting organic materials for compost.

would suggest adding composting worms to the gardens as well they will be a good addition when the natural worms come along.

anyhow there may be some ideas on our page?

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

One trick I do, other than making the little moats, dikes, and trenches to hold water near the plants is to water in 2, or even 3 passes.

First I water lightly to wet the surface. I go slowly from one end of the garden to the other.

Then I drag the hose back to the beginning and water more deeply. If its been very, very dry and/or I have reason to believe that the water has not penetrated well I drag the hose back and repeat the deep watering.

During the drought a couple years ago I dug pits positioned between the plants the watered by filling those holes with water.

You might try spraying baby shampoo on a test patch to see if that helps with wetting the soil. Obviously, the shampoo would need to be diluted, but you get the idea.

Here's a picture of my pumpkin patch -- showing my pure, white soil and the sandcastle-like basins that are my squash hills.

Beneath each of those fortresses, is a pit full of the rich, black, but grass-seed infested town compost to give the roots something to reach for.

Now that the planting is done for the next 6 weeks or so, I can work on getting the area between the hills mulched. I'm running out of leaves and will probably have to settle for pine straw -- which has to be put on much thicker and shouldn't be tilled in.

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