How do I fill my raised beds?

I'll be moving to my new place early this fall and am excited to begin gardening! The area is beautiful, and judging from the height of the weeds, the soil is fertile. However, there seems to be a little more clay than one would prefer, and at this time of year, it is hard to dig. I have read about raised beds, and thought that they might be the perfect solution. I have access to some compost, but it says not to plant directly in the compost -- how, then, do I fill the beds?

I am hesitant to purchase "top soil" because when I did it once before where I used to live, the soil was not very good. Also, (this sounds silly, I know), I "don't know where it has been" or what sort of unhealthly things might be in it.

So, if you want to be mostly organic in your approach to gardening, is there a safe way/place to purchase really good soil? I'd like to get started this fall in preparing the beds for spring, if it is too late to start some salad greens!

Are you building raised beds with solid sides or a traditional raised bed? The framed variety requires "filling" while the traditional method uses your native soil, which by your account is fertile. Simply mounding the soil and maintaining permanent walkways worked well for me and gardeners and farmers for thousands of years.

I have almost 2000 square feet of raised beds for veggies using the traditional method that I built by augmenting the soil with compost, manure and mulch.

Wayne

Hi, Wayne!

I'm thinking solid sides. We have very wet winters here, and I think having little "walls" will help keep the soil from being flooded and washed away.

With or without solid sides, I'd definitely consider using the native soil and adding large amounts of compost, chopped leaves, horse manure, grass clippings and other organic matter to the beds.

I find burying the native soil with trucked-in materials to be wasteful and almost always unnecessary. And, as you note, buying "topsoil" is an uncertain affair. I won't detail my usual method of building raised beds, double digging, since some here go into apoplectic shock at the very idea but I agree that a planting bed of pure compost is not a good, long-term idea.

You could begin building your new beds now by adding lots of organic material and working it into the top few inches of soil a little at a time. The beds will slowly "fluff up" and as the organic matter rots, your soil will become more fertile and consideraby looser. Drainage in the clay will also improve and the higher content of organic matter in the soil might even make rigid sides unnecessary.

Wayne
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First of all, raised beds, regardless of how you "raise" them is always a good idea. I have some experiences I will share with you and some may be useful to you.

I live in the Texas Hill Country on top of a ridge. I simply do not have top soil. Slam a pick into the "dirt" in any spot in my yard and it will hit rock within about two inches. Raised beds and hauled in dirt of some type is an absolute must here. I build raised beds from cedar fence boards which are 6 inches (actually 5.5 inches) wide and 6 foot long. These boards are not quite as thick as standard 3/4 inch lumber, measuring about 1/16th of an inch less thickness but in two years, I have only had one board bow on me and a slash knot defect caused that. I like 3 ft wide beds so 3 fence boards will build me a bed 3 ft wide by 6 footlong. I just string these together to make longer beds of 3 foot by however long you wont to make them. Twelve foot long beds allow me some 2 foot wide step through areas for navigating the garden with tools or wheelbarrow. These beds are strong enough to hold the soft fluffy type soil you wont in your raised bed without bowing out but if you like you can re-inforce them by driving a stake in the ground. Dont let anyone convince you you need spend a fortune on two-inch thick expensive lumber to make raised beds. These boards cost me $3.00 each including Texas tax at either home depot or Lowes so a 3x6 foot bed used 3 boards and cost $9.00 in lumber. The boards are rot-resistant cedar and within a year of sun and weather will turn a nice shade of gray. The soft wood is easily cut, even with hand saws, and when screwed together with a small piece of re-inforcing wood at the corners is sturdy enough for its job and is so light, you can pick a compleat 3x6 foot bed up with one hand and move it around anywhere you wont it. As you expand your garden, you might consider leaving your older finished raised beds to stand on their own while you move the frame to start some new beds.

As to dirt, I have used a bark based mix referred to and labled as "Landscape" mix. I can see finely ground bark fines along with the larger pieces of bark plus some course sand in the mix. It may have some peat moss in there too, I dont recognize it if it does but after two years I can still hand dig fluffy soil in all my beds. At Lowes, this Landscape mix is sold under the brand name of "Earths Finest" but I think all Landscape mixes will be basically the same and work well. I have also used a darker mix of "composted bark" and "humus" and bags simply marked "compost" with this same brand name. I simply use my dear old Granny's cooking technique to mix these different mixes together, you know how that works, a little dab of this and a little dab of that. The base mix I use though is predominantly the landscape mix. At Lowes, all these bags (2 cubic foot) cost about $3.00 each including Texas Tax. If Im remembering right, it takes about 5 bags to fully fill one of my super-duper Elcheapo 3X6 foot frames. So that makes $9 for lumber and $15 for fill, $24 per 3x6 bed. My labor I dont count cause all I would be doing is shifting it from one pocket to another. :)

Even though my yard doesnt have much actual dirt, it is still good enough to be home to grass and weeds. In your case, it sounds like you will have decent soil under your raised beds, so I would suggest a heavy layer of newspaper or cardboard over the ground before putting down the bed frame. This will control the grass and weeds and your flowers/vegetables will grow roots right down through the paper stuff within the first year. Earthworms like to come up from the bottom of a bed like that to feed on the paper and crawl up into and start farming your imported dirt. In a short time the original dirt and the imported dirt will meld into a nice mixture.

In my case, my front yard has a large (50 by 30 foot) raised area of rocky soil that was brought in to cover my septic system leach field. Not wonting to waste that area of ground but not wonting to grow vegetables over the sewer lines, I converted that to flower beds. Since I didnt wont flower plant roots growing down into and clogging my leach lines, I used some of that elcheapo ground cloth over the ground and built my beds over that. In 2 years time, the ground cloth has succeded in preventing root penetration from the plants. I grow all plants in that area in nursery pots since I just happened to have bought and scrounged and accumulated a few hundred nursery pots in various sizes such as one gallon, two gallon, four gallon and 5 gallon. I can place these in the grow beds in any manner I choose. It is sort of like square foot gardening but I suppose I should call it round foot gardening because I allow about an average of one square(round) foot to each pot. I experimented with different mixes in the leach field beds. In some, I put only pine bark mulch and simply sank the pots in the mulch, thinking to protect the pots some from the hot summer sun and the cold winter winds. The plants roots not only filled the pots but crept out the holes in the bottom of the pots and sneaked out across the bottom of bed under the mulch and I suppose are sucking some moisture from the ground up through the ground cloth.

In other beds I mixed some landscape mix in with bark mulch. The plants liked that even better with roots growing out the holes in the pots bottoms and snaking around in the thin layer of dirt in the bottom of the bed. In other beds, I put almost all landscape mix and the plants really, really liked that. When I try to lift a pot out of those beds, they come up with a whole bunch of roots dangling out the bottom of the pots. It is amazing the mass of roots growing out the pot bottoms of dwarf snapdragon plants into that landscape mix.

I really like that combination of Nursery pots and grow beds, especially when first starting a garden. It allows me to move plants around for different size and color combinations. Dont like that yaller marigold over there? Pick it up and move it over by the mexican marigold mint and move that purplish pink snapdragon where the marigold once was. It is easy to design a perennial flower bed by shifting the pots around untill you get it arranged like you permanently wont it to look like, then you simply lift the pot, turn it upside down to remove the pot, and then set the plant, dirt, and root ball right back into the perfectly shaped hole it came out of.

Since you are going to be new to your future garden just as I was here, I strongly can recommend having movable beds and growing in nursery pots as a combination for a couple of years at least untill you devise your final, final, final, permanent plan (If there is any such thing).:) Im finding that many plants that are listed as full sun really appreciate a little afternoon shade and some so-called shade lovers appreciate some morning sunshine. Then there are the different shade patterns from summer to winter to consider also.

I didn't mean to write an essay but anyway, thats my story, and Im sticking to it............for now..........probably...........well, at least for awhile.........untill some experiment proves that my first idea wasn't as good as my second.......or third.........or forth.

Thank you both so much for such detailed explanations. I feel much better prepared to tackle my yard. I appreciate your time and expertise!