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What material to fill raised beds with?
Laura Turner 2
Posts: 99
in Plants
Please can one of you helpful lot suggest what to fill our raised beds with. They are still under construction, should be finished by Monday though. It's keeping the husband busy!
Shall we fill with MOT first then top soil. How much depth of top soil should we need? I've hopefully attached some pictures below...
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It depends what you want to plant, and the aspect, but generally you need a mix of weed free soil, manure, grit (if you want plants that need really sharp drainage, or you get high rainfall) and compost.
Nice bit of construction by Mr T, Laura
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
Thanks Fairy girl. The bed is actually under a few trees so I don't think we'd want too much drainage as we need it to hold as much moisture as possible. It does get good sun.
I'm thinking maybe just weed free topsoil then?
Looks great :-) We have similar raised beds which we filled with topsoil and dug in some manure on the top. Later in the season we mulched with compost. A year on and our roses, lavender, jasmine, herbs, salvia and the rest are all looking great. Ours aren't under trees but they are in full sun - we don't have any drainage problems, nor do we need normally to water either.
I wouldn't fill these right up straight away so you have some surplus space for adding mulch later. Better to under-fill initially rather than adding too much especially if the soil isn't brilliant quality.
If you're keeping the tree, don't bury the base of the trunks as it looks like you have done already. They want to be above soil level down to the root collar, where the roots start coming out.
These beds look really nice Laura; I like the heavy sleeper look.
I agree with Fairy, fill them with soil and manure 50/50 would be my recommendation; then you can mulch later in the future.
We've got a holly and a hawthorn that will be in the beds. We haven't done anything with soil yet, that's how they were. We are keeping them so I guess we'll need to build some sort of wall around them. I didn't realise this so Thankyou.
I am a horse owner so getting hold of manure is no problem!
Once I've filled it with soil, I need to decide what to plant! There will be quite a lot of space to fill!
I had raised beds at my last place made from modern sleepers (as opposed to old railway ones) and they were rotting as I left so would it be an idea to line with plastic before back-filling? Or painting with bituminous paint on the inside?
It only took a couple of years for mine to quite drastically degrade.