Where to Find Free (or Cheap) Soil for Raised Beds
Many gardeners enjoy using raised beds to grow their crops—they create a nice border, limit weed growth, and ease the strain on your back—but they can be quite expensive to fill, especially if they’re over a foot tall. However, you don’t have to buy several bags of soil to get quality, nutrient-rich seedling material. Follow these tips to get cheap (and sometimes free) filler for your raised beds.
Check your local garbage disposal
A good place to start if you’re looking for free or cheap soil is your local municipal waste disposal service. If your community has a composting program, you may be able to get compost for free or at a deep discount. You’ll need to mix municipal compost with coco coir ($9.99 per 1.4 lb brick) or peat moss ($23.98 per 3 cubic feet), as well as some vermiculite ($16.34 per 8 -liter bag) to get good consistency and absorbency for growing. plants.
While you’re there, keep an eye on mulch from tree branches and garden straw, which can be placed in the bottom of the raised bed under the soil.
Use chip reset
For free mulch to line raised beds or to control moisture and weeds on the surface of raised beds, you can use wood chip mulch. Wood chips and scraps are also great for growing mushrooms. Many areas have a free service available called Chip Drop , where you can request wood chips, logs, or pieces of trees cut down by local arborists and tree care companies.
Buy soil wholesale.
It’s the same quality as the bagged stuff from the hardware store, but if you can get soil in bulk from your local garden store, you’ll save a lot. Just be sure to only use garden soil to fill raised beds—using unmixed topsoil can starve your plants of nutrients, and using soil that contains weed seeds or invasive fungi will require you to do more work down the road. You can often find ox manure compost ($2.47 per cubic foot) at hardware stores or garden centers for a lower price than other types of garden soil.
Try the Hughlkultur method
Hugelkultur is a gardening technique that originated in Germany. The idea is to fill the bottoms of your raised bed with organic material that you can get for free: tree branches and limbs, mulch, and even plastic-free tape and cardboard can be used along the bottom layers of your raised bed to minimize the amount of soil needed . Start with the largest pieces of material and gradually work your way down to smaller pieces. Mulch and other small pieces should go up, under the soil. You’ll need about 8 inches of soil to plant a garden, so you can fill the first foot—or even two feet—of your taller raised beds with other organic material, saving a few cubic yards of soil in the process.
Connect with your local gardening community
Another way to get free raised bed material is through local gardening forums. Sometimes people are willing to donate unused soil, mulch from fallen tree branches, or community-owned compost. By contacting other gardeners in your area, you may be able to find some free supplies or get information about local offerings.
However, be sure to use materials that will not introduce fungi or pests into your garden soil, and be sure to check any loose soil for weed seeds. If there are a lot of seeds, you might prefer to pay for seedless soil, unless you like the weeding.