Starting a Set of Experiments to Turn Sand into Soil

It is time to do the tests I always wanted to do but somehow never did.

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38 comments

  • IlIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIlIl

    i don’t know how i came across this but i subscribed

  • LibertyNotLicense

    700 views and fewer than 100 likes?! C’mon folks! Show some love! (It’s not that expensive….)

  • raymondrespressiii

    Hey welcome back. Working on feeding my family from my garden here in Highlands County in central Florida on the ridge. I know your plight. I do the “Chinese

    • raymondrespressiii

      Wow I don’t know what happen to that. Tried to fix the word Chinese with spell check and half my post turned red and got lost. Don’t have time to retype everything but I was saying I do the Toro chop and drop to fill my compost piles and that I once grew a massive pepper plant in a barrel of drywall I was saving. Chinese drywall just has extra sulfur I think. My brother and I washed down a well with cat litter one time. Do you think it is safe to compost litter that has been “charged” by my daughter’s cat if I let it compost for an extended time?

    • Lisa Kukla

      @raymondrespressiii Look up Toxoplasmosis first.

  • A Philippines Adventure

    We have similar issues a lot of places in the Philippines. A good start is clay components, Gypsum and humus. A lot of crops actually thrive in well drained sandy soils like that. Of course, our coconut seems to thrive even on almost pure sand, but really, it will bear more if it is a better soil. It does tolerate sand, even salt.

  • GlenInPhoenix

    Let a pile of wood chips compost and use it as an amendment. You have the space

  • BABETTE IS IN THE GARDEN

    Oh compost my favorite subject

  • anita paulsen

    And how about a bed where you combine those different things? We have sandy loam and I would like to add humus, compost, clay and biochar to it for a vegetable garden.

  • Sheila Ackers

    Do you have any access to seaweed?

  • Jim T

    Dubious wisdom indeed!

  • colonelreese

    I made a bunch and crushing it is a pain! I was really unhappy with the size of the particles. The best way i found to crush it is to put it in a harbor freight cement mixer with a bowling ball in it and let it run for a few minutes.

    • colonelreese

      I was talking about biochar sorry for the lack of context.

    • Lisa Kukla

      That’s super clever. Edible Acres puts it in feed bags and lays them in pathways where he walks the most throughout the day, so it gets crushed without spending any extra effort.
      I’ll probably try driving over it a few times when I’m able to get started.

  • John Gault

    I’m glad I’m not alone. I LOVE ALL THE EXTRA CO2!!!

  • Mark Evans

    Re the clay/sand forming cement type soil, over here in the UK, people who wish to top dress their clay based lawns with sand are advised to use ‘play sand’ as opposed to sharp sand, the greens keepers on golf courses use something similar, but essentially the structure of the sand is round as opposed to sharp sand which has sharp edges/square edges, which can lock together and prevent drainage/air exchange, Just thought i’d make that point as it may apply to gardening.

  • Tibor Tamas

    20 ads in a single video makes it unenjoyable :/

  • South Florida gardener

    wow man advertisements every 2 or 3 minutes… i stopped watching the video

  • Xorok

    Introducing Amazon’s Terra Preta shipping service – for more nematode diversity in Florida! 😄

  • Jean Paul Dupuis

    Get a paper shredder and start collecting all those glossy colorful flyers and brochures that you aren’t ever ever ever supposed to compost. The gloss is clay. I’m very fortunate that in my neighborhood some people in a minivan drive by twice a week and toss a bundle of clay amendments into my driveway from their passenger window. Sometimes I find clay amendments stuck in my front door. And all my breakfast cereal comes packaged in clay amendments. No paper waste leaves my property.

    • David The Good

      I used to have a paper shredder. Good idea.

    • Jean Paul Dupuis

      I allow a latched municipal green bin to fill for months with alternating layers of soggy super-green kitchen waste (which would attract vermin if added to my aerobic compost) and dry super-brown shredded paper. For weeks the paper sops and swells with anaerobic decomposition juices. When the green bin is full, I dump the fetid slurry over a big pile of accumulated yard waste (leaves, sticks, tomato vines, etc) and pulverize to dime-size under the lawnmower. Now thoroughly homogenized and oxygenated, the supercharged mulch goes into my aerobic EarthMachines where it promptly begins steaming later the same day. A month or less later, it’s ready to use for anything from topdressing to seed starting, with very few bits of identifiable red Fruit Loops box. The long anaerobic pre-composting in the green bin is essential to making the paper ‘vanish’ into the compost.

    • Jean Paul Dupuis

      …I’ve tried using shredded paper without pre-composting, thinking the alley-oop of shredding would suffice for nature to take over. I’ve added dry shreds directly to the wet aerobic compost, and mixed dry shreds into wet soil in a new raised bed. Months later, inks and gloss coatings had mostly vanished. But more than a year later, huge amounts of pristine white bleached paper remained visible. If you want composting organisms to eat any of that dense sterile paper, you must open it up and saturate it with suitable nutrition. The long anaerobic soak seems to solve everything perfectly.

    • Lisa Kukla

      @Jean Paul Dupuis Fascinating.

  • FreeganDave Hartman

    I just sifted about 10 buckets of red clay here in Montana. I needed a way to get it into this granite-based soil. Thanks for the great idea of making a slurry!

  • Loriful

    The secret to the South American rainforest soil is the Sahara Dust Storms that bring in all the fertile soil that erodes from Africa, that’s why the Amazon is literally doubly fertile~ The dust storms also sometimes roll into the southern United States.

  • Robert Tozzi

    I thought I was done buying kitty litter after potty training my cat. True story! 🙂

  • JustinYawnUnplugged

    I graduated from Baldwin county high school. I was raised in Stapleton. That’s between you and loxley.

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