Texas gardener Marshall Hensley has found Coir to be fast way to prepare his heavy clay based garden beds quickly. Wanting to plant some carrots for a before the holidays harvest, he realized his beds would need some work to make them carrot friendly. Typically he would have amended his soil with compost but his compost bins weren’t quite ready to provide the organic material necessary. Purchasing compost would have been expensive and so he turned to a product he knew he could trust to be just what was necessary to foster growth from moisture loving carrots: Coir.
Peat moss is not expensive and is commonly offered as a solution. But for a number of reasons, I prefer to use coconut coir, a cheap, effective and eco-friendly material that beats just about anything else.
Hensley describes how to use coir in this article from Culture Map.