Once upon a time on usenet George Shirley wrote:
[snipped again]
Was going to start amending the last raised bed today, got another
!@#$% cold front moving in and it might freeze by the end of the
week. Drat! my pear tree is currently in full bloom, might mean
another year with no pears. Have to go to town and buy some dirt.
Never thought I would be buying dirt but we live on six inches of
river sand atop five feet of Houston gumbo clay so we have to amend
everything we plant.

We *finally* have some rain forecast for the next few days after not having
rain to speak of since just before Christmas. I hope the forecasters have it
right this time. It annoys me how the forecasters think that 'hot and dry'
is a good forecast and rain is a bad one - even when most of the country's
experiencing extra-dry conditions and large parts are in drought!

The soil here is rich - but only 4" deep. Below that it's a hard clay pan
that takes a crowbar to break up (I know from when I mistakenly planted
trees in the ground). My using raised beds isn't so much because there's no
soil, rather because there's not enough of it. (I used to wonder why I'd
always get blossom end rot on my tomatoes, despite regular watering before I
put the raised beds in.)

I made my own 'dirt' originally, with the first raised bed (peat and my own
compost mixed with pumice sand and vermiculite). However that got very
expensive and it was at a time that my back got worse so that now I no
longer have significant amounts of compost coming on. These days I buy
'compost' when it's cheap. In early spring the big chains usually compete
with each other and I can get four 40l bags of it for under $20. It's
largely pine bark from our forestry industry and hardly composted at all so
isn't high-grade. However I try to leave it in the (perforated) bags in
contact with the soil in a cool and shady part of the section for a year
before I use it. Then it's a much better product, black. rich and crawling
with critters.

I also add used (cheap) potting mix - which I tend to have lots of due to my
growing dwarf trees in containers and having to pot them up regularly and my
constant experiments with cuttings put into pot mix, only a small fraction
of which have taken this year.
--
Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)