Soil Composition Questions - I don't know what I'm doing

Generally, I container garden, but I'm plotting an actual bed in the ground for next year (I'm in the initial assessment stage where I'n trying to figure out what will cost how much etc.). The bed will contain some flowers, herbs, and vegetables. It's a long, narrow, 80 square feet, and the plan is for some perennials like columbine, pincushion flowers, and tulips, along side pyrethrum daisies, hyssop, and then moving to annual veggies like decorative corn, beans, cucumbers, carrots, beets, and tomatoes.

The plan is to dig the top foot of crappy, sandy, miserably hard soil out of the bed and completely replace it with some good garden soil. I intend to use top soil, compost, and manure. I have also been reading about perlite/vermiculite and think that incorporating some cannot be a bad idea. However, I don't know how much of what to use.

The reading I have done has suggested anywhere between 10 and 80% perlite, which is a HUGE discrepancy, so I come to you, gardeners, for soil advice.

I was thinking of composing the soil thusly, PLEASE help me figure out the correct composition and correct these numbers if they're way off base.

Soil: 55%
Compost: 20%
Perlite: 15%
Manure: 10%

Hi Jess- I think this depends on what you are going to be using for the "soil" component. If it is the native soil, you need to find out what it is composed of. "sand" and 'hard" are usually two different things (hard often means a high clay component) Hard sandy soil can often mean half clay and half sand, which is basically a solid like adobe. You can have a soil test done, or check it yourself, or just get on the web and find out what is the usual soil in Greeley and assume you have that.
If you are not going to use your soil, I assume you are going to purchase "soil" . If sold as "topsoil" it is likely the top layer of soil scraped off for a nearby housing development, and may be exactly what you already have (this happened to my mother, she spent money to buy clay just like what was already there). Topsoil can be good garden soil, or crappy, as you have found. If it is called something more like "planting mix" then the company has already mixed up a bunch of amendments, often these are mostly compost, sometimes they need fertilizer (that happened to me. Once I fertilized it worked fine).
There are some famous garden writers from Colorado, I will go look in the DG Bookworm section for the names. Also the Denver Botanic Garden might be a great resource for you.

You might get "The Undaunted Garden" by Lauren Springer Ogden out of the library. Also look for books by her husband Scott, they are from Colorado.

Pistil,

Thank you so much for the timely advice! I was planning on purchasing some hardware store top soil: specifically, thus stuff http://www.homedepot.com/p/Timberline-40-lb-Top-Soil-bg40-tsoc/206274742?N=5yc1vZbx67.

And I'll be sure to dig a surreptitious finger into whatever I buy to make sure I'm not buying the local adobe. The trouble with the soil currently inhabiting my bed is that there's no organic material in it whatsoever. When it's dry, it's hard as a rock. I can only work it when it's been raining. When I do exert a little pressure on it, it crumbles into sandy grit, so the goal is just to get rid of the top foot, amend a little further, and replace that top foot with a decent blend of organic material and perhaps a very small percentage of the local stuff for the mineral content.

I just want to be sure it's draining well and will grow veggies effectively without to do this again NEXT year. :)