Soil Mixture for Square Foot Gardens

I wanted to document the soil mixture that we used this year to help fill the garden box. I'm sure you're tired of seeing our lovely garden box by now, but just hang in there a little bit longer.

We knew that we could use the soil mixture that we had already in our wagon garden, but we were almost tripling the size of the new garden so we would definitely need more. We ended up needing about 24 cubic feet more of soil. David helped me with all of the math to see how much we would need. You take the length of your box (12') x width (4') x depth you want to fill with soil (1'). I rounded to make it easy on the depth. For a square foot garden you need approx 8-10" of soil for the roots to grow (you could get away with 6"). This for us equaled 48 cubic feet of soil. We filled our box with the wagon soil and now only needed 6" (1/2 foot) of soil or 24 cubic feet.

We headed to Pike Nurseries to get all our supplies. We found them last year after calling around for vermiculite. Their prices were cheaper than any home depot type place. You need 1/3 of peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite and 1/3 compost (they say to use at least 3 diff. kinds).  For us that was 8 cubic feet of each. You see here Hen Manure/compost, mushroom compost, and cow manure for our compost mixture. Last year we just used the cow manure compost because it is much cheaper, but if you can splurge try to have a variety. The total for all this was around $55. Another tip, peat moss expands when you take it out of the bag, so we only got 3.5 cubic feet to keep our cost down.

We had to just use our hands to mix it all together. It was kind of fun, but was very hard to wash it all off.

So far, without any vegetable transplants, we've spent $85 on the garden this year including building materials, weed mat, and soil mixture.

I went back out later Sunday evening only to find that something got into the garden box. She has 4 legs and is really cute if you ask her if she was in the garden. We're going to maybe put some wire fencing or something around the garden to keep our silly little doggie out of it! It's cute now only until there are real vegetables in there.