I'm about to buy a ton or so of dirt, and am not sure what to buy. Some of it is for the rose garden (15x24) and some is for the herb garden (20' diameter) and some for the poor convoluted yard I'll have sod for by the weekend (touch wood). The builder put mainly sand in when he pretended to level the yard, but it's really a sandy loam by now. I've got compost going, so I can amend it by and by.
Topsoil? 60/40? Which should I get?
Thanks!
quick dirt question
It really depends on what you can afford. I got 40 yards of topsoil and 10 yards of compost and 10 yards of 4way when I had to get dirt to fill up all my beds.. If you get topsoil check it before you accept it. Some topsoil is mostly all clay (or at least one of the loads I got was).
What is 4way?
top soil - compost - sand - manure
Hmmm... that sounds good, if the compost is really composted and all that. (I made the mistake of buying compost at W/Mart, and after the rain, what I had was lots and lots of little sticks.) Maybe I can go out to this place and see what they have before I buy it. Thanks for the input.
I would buy the top of the line product they have--garden soil...if I were buying soil. That's what I did when I built this house for all my garden beds. I haven't regretted it. Then all I had to do was start composting. I'm a big believer in you get what you pay for. Just my thoughts.
You can't beat good quality composted animal manure. In the Dallas area, I go to Soil Buiding Systems. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to improve the soil you have by adding good compost. Buy it in bulk if possible. Otherwise, apply dry molasses and or humate. Dry molasses at 15 lbs. per 1000 square feet and humate as the budget allows. Do not use any high nitrogen fertilizers, as they force plants to grow too fast resulting in weak, watery cells. Then come nature's clean-up crew (insect pest invasion) to take out the weak plants. If you try and control the insect pests by killing them, you will end up with a bigger mess. Nature has checks and balances. She's pretty darn smart.
Thanks, everyone. I found a guy who said he'd found the best topsoil he'd seen in this area, and am getting 8 yards delivered next week. Pricey, but I trust WELL worth it. He said it wasn't clay, so I'll trust him. My compost bin is very busy, I'm happy to say, and so are the worms in the bin in the pantry. Of course, I'd have to turn the entire pantry into a worm bin to harvest enough of that for the yard, but I'll be using this in the rose garden. If the compost tumbler would only work the way it's advertised, I'd be in high cotton now. Ah, well.
organic1, in your opinion, is alfalfa tea too high in nitrogen? I've been using it on everything. And I don't kill any bugs unless I know they're harmful, and then I do it by hand. Okay, I've been killing the black widows indiscriminately, but my 4yoa granddaughter gardens with me and I figure I'll take that karma.