Raised Garden Bed Soil Mix
Mel’s mix in raised bed #1 perfect raised bed soil recipe.
Raised garden bed soil mix. Mix by rolling the bag on the ground. Which is why we will tell you how to have the perfect soil mix recipe. The mix i used the first year was 1/2 organic raised bed mix (expensive), 1/4 top soil and 1/4 compost.
The various bagged mixes out there have proprietary blends of different ingredients. Raised bed gardening is really the way to go, particularly if your native soil is terrible with clay, rock, or sand. After reading square foot gardening for the first time over 12 years ago, i decided to start.
Remember, compost, peat moss and vermiculite (the 3 components of this recipe) are measured in cubic feet or cubic yards, so you will be given. The bed with the better soil produced 5 times as many pounds of tomatoes as the bed with soil that wasn’t as great. Add a little water to the bags.
It consisted of 50% topsoil, 30% compost, and 20% organic matter. This bed is often blocked off with planks of wood and has its own special soil mixture. This year in the spring i added compost to the raised beds.
I didn’t come up with this mix, we can thank mel bartholomew, the author of square foot gardening, for simplifying the best soil to use for raised bed vegetable gardening. After you’ve built your fabulous raised garden boxes with the correct materials, it’s time to fill ’em up!the goal should be to create an ecosystem for plants which is well aerated yet retains moisture and nutrients, feeds the roots, encourages worms and other microbial activity, and is in essence a living, breathing soil. You can easily calculate your soil needs with a soil calculator here:
Last year, we used mel's mix to fill our two raised beds and vowed to find a less expensive way for the future. There are three main components to the soil mix: Our best soil mix for raised gardens is 50% composted plant/wood matter & 50% composted horse manure/stall sweepings.