Soil Amendment Services in Colleyville, TX

Building Healthy Soil in North Texas (The Organic Way)

WHY SOIL IMPROVEMENT MATTERS IN NORTH TEXAS

Most North Texas soils — whether heavy clay or sandy — need improvement before plants will truly thrive. The best way to fix this is by adding organic matter like compost, along with targeted soil amendments that improve structure, support beneficial microbes, and restore natural mineral balance.

If you’ve tried planting something and it struggled, the issue often isn’t the plant—it’s the soil.

Across Arlington, Bedford, Colleyville, Southlake, and surrounding areas, most soils fall into two categories:

Heavy clay soils that drain poorly and compact easily
Sandy soils that drain too quickly and don’t hold nutrients

In both cases, the common issue is the same: a lack of organic matter and biological activity.

Healthy soil isn’t just dirt — it’s a living ecosystem. When you improve your soil, you create the conditions where Texas native and adapted plants can establish more easily, grow stronger, and require less intervention over time.

Choosing the Right Soil Amendments

Amending your soil often starts with adding compost. However, not all composts are the same. Different blends are designed for:

Lawns
Flower beds
Vegetable gardens

While they all improve soil, choosing the right one can give you better results depending on your project.

Depending on the condition of your soil, other additives can also be beneficial. For example, because of the prevalence of Phytophthora Root Rot in North Texas, we treat the soil in all of our new installations with biological controls that attack Phytophthora organisms.

Nearly all gardens can benefit from adding Humates, which is a concentrated source of carbon that can dramatically improve the growth and vitality of your plants.

Lava Sand can help loosen heavy clay soil, while Texas Green Sand, which can also help with soil structure, also adds vital trace minerals not found in fertilizers. And Dry Molasses provides sugars, which feed beneficial organisms in your soil.

Marshall Grain carries more than 50 different kinds of composts, soils, dry and liquid fertilizers, and other soil amendments. Click here to view our product catalog.

Our maintenance team can develop a tailored program for your landscape based on your specific conditions.

OUR EXPERTISE

Marshall Grain has been the leader in organic yard care solutions for North Texas for more than 40 years, serving organic gardeners since 1980s. Our expertise comes from our direct experience in testing and refining the best organic solutions for North Texas landscapes. We think you'll agree that organic solutions are both safer for you and more effective for your lawn landscape.

Whether you choose to do it yourself, or hire us to apply it for you, we can recommend the right solutions. Contact us today to learn how we can help.

SOIL AMENDMENT PRODUCTS

THE FOUNDATION

Compost is the single most important soil amendment you can add.

It helps:

Improve drainage in clay soils
Increase water retention in sandy soils
Add organic matter that feeds soil life
Create a more balanced, plant-friendly environment

Whether you're working on flower beds, vegetable gardens, or lawn areas, compost is always the starting point.

We offer several types of high-quality composts.

View our compost products.

IMPROVING SOIL STRUCTURE

These amendments help physically improve how your soil functions.

If you’re dealing with dense clay soil — which is very common in North Texas — these materials can make a noticeable difference in how your soil handles water and root growth.

FEEDING THE SOIL BIOLOGY

When your soil biology is active, plants can access nutrients more efficiently and naturally resist stress. These amendments help stimulate beneficial microbial activity:

RESTORING MINERAL BALANCE

Natural mineral amendments:

Add essential micronutrients
Support overall plant health
Improve long-term soil fertility

For vegetable gardens, mineral-rich soil can also improve the nutritional value of what you grow.

Marshall Grain offers these mineral products:

FIXING SICK SOIL

Sometimes soil becomes unbalanced—especially after years of chemical use.

Bio-Inoculants and specialty compost can help restore populations of beneficial bacteria and microbes and well as help

suppress harmful organisms.

Biologically active Composts may also assist in managing issues like Take-All Root Rot.

Our bio-Inoculants and specialty composts include:

OUR ORGANIC LAWN MAINTENANCE PROCESS

Click on the numbers below to learn the steps of our organic lawn maintenance process!

REQUEST A CALL

Fill in our contact form online, drop by our store, or call us anytime. During store business hours a human will answer or after hours you may leave a voicemail. If one of our maintenance experts is not available to speak with you immediately, we will call you within 1 business day to get initial information about your yard and set an appointment for an on-site visit.

Our maintenance expert will walk with you through your property, note your specific concerns, look for problem areas that need special treatment, establish the history of problems and what treatments and fertilizations have been applied, identify your soil type, note plants with special needs, and establish the scope of the services you want us to provide. Determining existing problems tells us what special treatments may be required. We see many yards with fungal problems, root rot, and insect infestations. The condition of the soil is important since healthy soil makes healthy plants. North Texas has a variety of soils: heavy clays of varying nutrient content, very sandy soils with little organic matter and difficult rocky soils. The top soil in yards is often thin and sometimes erosion has carried the top soil away. The soil in many yards has been damaged by the long use of chemical fertilizers. There is normally a charge of $40 for this visit.

Using the information we gather, we will create a written 12-month organic maintenance plan to develop your property to its full potential. This plan includes a schedule for service calls and the cost of each visit. The plan normally takes 2 business days, but we will make a specific time commitment when we do the on-site visit. We will normally send the plan to you by email and follow up with a telephone call the next day to review the plan with you. When you are satisfied with the proposal, we ask that you sign the plan and establish whether you want to pay for the year in advance (with a discount) or pay for each visit as it occurs.

Visits are scheduled by the month, but at least a day before each visit we will contact you by your preferred method of communication (telephone, text or email) to make sure the date is convenient. Upon arriving at your property, we will knock to let you know we are there, perform the scheduled tasks and look for any problems that are developing. At the conclusion of the service call we will leave behind a written summary of the services we have performed and notes on any problems we have seen.