Hi

Though northern Virginia has the dreaded clay soil, I was surprised
when I moved into my current house and found that it's built on what
used to be an old river bed. My soil is mostly sand and gravel, with
"gravel" up to the size of baking potatoes. Raised beds it had to be.
The guy who tried to till me a garden with a rear-tine tiller made
beautiful spark showers on the rocks.

I made 4 raised beds, using 2" x 10" X 8' boards. The beds are 4' x
8'. Going on the instructions of a book called "Cubed Foot
Gardening", I plopped the frames down on my yard grass and filled them
up. What I used was a mix that my local topsoil company makes that's
regular clay topsoil mixed with leaf mulch. I mixed this with
additional composted leaf mulch at about 2/3 topsoil mix to 1/3 leaf
mulch and filled the beds up. I didn't dig it in, didn't bother to
kill the grass, or anything like that. I DID need to add a bit of
nitrogen the first year, since I used so much leaf mulch to begin
with, but that was the only deficiency noted. For the 4 beds, I spent
about $150 for the soil, which was about 5 cubic yards, if I remember
correctly. (3 of the mix, 2 of leaf mulch) They were filled to about
1" from the top. I had a wonderful harvest the first year. Zucchini,
tomatoes, chiles, eggplant, beans, cucumbers. (Made 52 pints of bread
and butter pickles, in addition to the cucumbers we ate fresh!) After
the first year, I got another yard of leaf mulch that I mixed in and
things grew great the second year, also. The beds are FULL of
earthworms during the summer.

I was just out on Saturday doing some clearing of weeds and leaves.
The soil is gorgeous black stuff. In the next day or so, I'll be
putting down black plastic on one bed to warm the soil a bit, then
removing that and planting lettuce, radishes, beets, and broccoli raab
under tunnels. Come spring, I'll be putting in 2 more beds, both 6' x
20' x 10", one for corn and one for tomatoes. They'll be filled with
the same stuff. As far as I'm concerned, you don't need to dig the
raised bed soil into the ground soil, and 10" beds are plenty deep
enough. Let the passage of ground insects and worms meld the two, and
let the sod decompose to add to the organic material.

YMMV

Robin
Alexandria, VA



On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 20:21:16 -0800, "WeeWilly"
wrote:

I've had the same question. We are "blessed" with clay soil here in most of
Calif. I'd like to build some raised bed gardens but can't get over the
cost of not only building the structure.. but mainly filling the beds. If I
build six beds that are 4'x10'x12" I'm looking at about 40 cubic feet of
material per bed if I dig some of the material down into the local soil.
This times, let's say 5 beds is 240 cubic feet or about 9 yards..

Anyone know a way to reduce the overall cost of the soil? Might be a dumb
question.. but thanks for bearing with me.

Bill