Gardening Myth #4 – Does Adding Sand Improve Clay Soil?

Another myth we have, does adding sand improve clay soil?

No. It will improve drainage, but clay soil needs to be amended with a compost and better soil. Clay soil, nothing’s going to grow in clay. It needs to be taken care of, and no amount of fertilizer is going to make things grow in clay. If you put sand in clay, it would be like cement. You’re making some sort of concrete or something at that point. You need to amend that with a compost.

And really, if it’s really bad, you can mix sand in with your compost because that helps with drainage. When you dig a hole in the ground and it’s clay, a lot of times when you water it, the water just lays there. You almost created a bowl inside the ground. Adding clay and digging the hole, if you’re dealing with clay soil, digging the hole a little deeper, amending the soil underneath the root system is a good idea, because that’s going to allow the excess water to drain away from the roots itself and allow the roots to establish in that soil better that way.

That’s a big thing we get a lot. There’s a lot of clay around here. A lot of older areas have better soil. Newer areas and a lot of new developments use kind of a back fill soil and it has no nutrients.

One of the ways the developers save money is when they first buy a property, they’ll grade off all the topsoil and sell it. It’s how they recoup some of their money in the beginning stages of creating the allotment. So sometimes it can add significant costs if the developer did that and you have to put in a two acre yard when there’s no topsoil left. So that grass isn’t going to want to come in.

Some people are sometimes surprised by our quotes because we’re looking at the depth of that soil. If there’s an inch of topsoil, it’s not going to grow grass well. You need three, four inches of decent topsoil to produce a good grass and a good root system for that grass to survive the droughts, the extreme colds in the wintertime. And so a lot of times in our quotes, we have 10, 15, 20 tons of topsoil. And that’s because we know that that was removed from that property. It has to be added back to it for the plants to have success.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).