Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi, I have made some new raised beds and plan to fill them with top soil. Having never bought this before I'm not sure where I should be getting it from... garden centre, an online company that can deliver? Altogether the bed area is about 20 by 15 foot. Any advice much appreciated.

Someone posted some info on top soil recently (that means this year!) and I think they said it comes in 3 grades and each grade has an agreed national spec.

It might be worth a search.

thanks, must be being dim, have searched and can't find it. never mind, I think I'll just get it from a garden centre

Hi Bigpepperplant

Wickes are currently doing some top soil four bags for a tenner, but will take a lot of bags for one bed as they are not large bags, can you find another source? put an advert on your local freecycle site, someone must be diigging out some foundations somewhere, you can seive the soil and add some organic stuff, your local tip might have some compost / usually sold as soil conditioner to mix with the topsoil. What I did was dug the paths between the raised beds down a few inches and put that top soil into the beds with whatever else i had, home made compost, horse manure etc depending on what I wanted to plant. Bagged topsoil is great if you only want a bit!! Good luck anyway!!!

Hello Bigpepper
This is quite a lot of soil and buying bags from the garden centre is going to be very very expensive. Is there any way that you can work around this problem in your own garden? Can you take soil from your flower beds or borders or get it from creating paths around your raised beds then mixing in some organic matter to fill your raised beds? Maybe you've thought of this already?
Try a small ad in the local paper to see if a nearby builder might be happy to deliver you some soil instead of skipping it off a job - do look carefully at what your going to get though.

John

Read your local paper's classified and trade add's.

Mine has several persons adrevtising topsoil every week.