Sammy25
wibbled on Sunday 25 April 2010 17:01


Hi,

I am currently re-doing my garden, we are lifting up 3inchs of concrete
which has been in the garden for over 20years ... the soil in the
boarders is poor (clay) so we are going to get some top soil so we can
grow fruit and veg and have a nice lawn which (hopefully) wont get water
logged. I have never bought topsoil before and was hoping for some
advice, we don't have a lot of money and after a few google searches its
looking its looking to cost around £90 per ton, is this reasonable? ...
i think we will need about 8/9 tons all together. Does anyone know of
any good places around the Bristol / Bath areas for topsoil?


90/ton sounds fairly unreasonable.

In East Sussex, it can be had in ton crane bags (less than a ton actual
weight) for about 40+VAT.

I do believe it is cheaper by the truckload. Small flatbed tipper will hold
3-4 tons - having seen such a tipper dump 3 or so tons at our local school
where I was helping to make some veggie patches.

If it's costing more than 30/ton by the truck, I'd ring around some more.

Also - be sure what you are getting. There's "screened" which should be free
of large rocks and sods, and there's unscreened which may be cheaper, but
has probably been scraped straight off the top of a soon-to-be building
site.


--
Tim Watts

Managers, politicians and environmentalists: Nature's carbon buffer.