"Chookie" wrote in message
...
In article , "Luke"

wrote:

It's been a long time since I've posted here but I've recently gone
through
a riverchange (moved from Adelaide to the beautiful river town of
Mannum).
The house we've moved into has a little veggie patch in the front yard
which
gets full sun pretty much all day and the soil is quite sandy. My
question
is what sort of veggies will grow well here, bearing in mind as of
January 1
we have major water restrictions.

I have no experience with sandy soils, but root vegies generally do well
in
sandy soil because it is easy to push through. Carrots, parsnips, etc
prefer
it.

Any ideas for what I could plant now and
then down the track what are good winter and summer veggies for this
soil.
Or should I be trying to improve the soil.

Definitely, because the down side of sandy soil is that it doesn't retain
water very well.

horse poop is an ideal soil conditioner and fertiliser. If you are prepared
to wait until autumn to plant a garden mixing horse poop in with the soil,
or even simply sheet mulching it on top of the soil, will improve the
quality surprisingly quickly. If you are worrid about seeds coming up cover
the poop with black plastic (staked down) or something like old wool based
carpet or hessian carpet underlay. Any weeds coming up will either get
scorched to death by the black plastic or die under the carpet due to a lack
of sunlight. In autumn you will have really nice crumbly soil, good humus
and likely a stack or worms. The soil will be much better at retaining
moisture and be choka full of nutrients. Whilst horse poop is low is
nutrients on a pound per pound basis with synthetic fertilisers in bulk it
is perfect.

rob