Many gardeners face the problem of having soil that is too
heavy. The soil on my farm has a lot of
clay which holds water for a long time and gets really hard when it dries
out. Some crops don’t seem to mind this too
much; but some, like onions and sweet potatoes, need loose, well drained soil
to produce a good crop. I am currently
putting in a small bed of sweet potatoes, and I really need to amend my soil to
loosen it up. I have grown sweet
potatoes in the past but, because of the heavy soil, the tubers tended to be
long and thin and very misshapen.
Nothing like what you find at the grocery store.
So I need, basically, two things to add to the soil. I need sand and compost. The compost is no problem because I make my
own, the sand is a little more problematic.
I thought about buying some bags of sandbox sand at the local hardware
store, but the price was a little steep ($3.50 per bag).
Gardening is fun, but I also want it to be
cost effective. It doesn’t make sense to
spend $20 on dirt to grow $5 worth of sweet potatoes, so I started looking
around for an alternative.
I found the alternative less than a mile from my farm. East Texas
gets a lot of rain, and nearly every road has what we call bar ditches dug on
each side of the road to channel run-off away from the road. When we get a good rain it washes sand off of
the nearby fields, if they have a lot of sand in them, and deposits the sand in
the bar ditches.
The county road crews
have to constantly clean out the bar ditches because they fill up with
sand. I found a bar ditch that was
loaded with beautiful, clean, washed sand; and I decided to save the road crew
a little work. I took my truck, a
five-gallon bucket, and a shovel down to the bar ditch, and in about 20 minutes
I had scooped up eight or ten buckets full of sand. Probably the equivalent of about 5 or 6 bags
of sandbox sand.
I spread the sand out to turn into by future sweet potato
bed.
It is perfect, and I saved myself about twenty bucks by using free bar ditch sand.
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