Advice: SoCal topsoil & materials for raised beds?

[tomgirletc]

Hello....I am buying a house with a decent sized back yard, scheduled to close early April and the first weekend in the house I am going to try and build some raised beds and get some tomatoes, veggies, herbs in. The house is in the Highland Park neighborhood, NE Los Angeles.

I'd like to build with composite wood deck scraps, quite a bit of fencing wire, and will need a large amount of topsoil, compost, mulch etc. Of course, I'm interested in doing it the cheapest way possible. So any ideas for these materials is much appreciated.

I've been searching both craigslist Los Angeles and Orange county but not scoring on deck scraps yet.

Where might the cheapest place be to get a great big load of topsoil?

Has anyone use the LA city distribution compost and mulch? Is it decent, at least for my first growing season?

I've crossposted in the GW tom & California forums too to maximize response.

I'm going to buy mostly from Laurel's Heirlooms as long as she still has what I want since I haven't started seeds in my gardening adventures yet and won't have enough time this season. This is what I hope I have room for:

Anna Russian
Aunt Gertie's Gold
Aunt Ruby's German Green
Azoychka
Brandywine Sudduth
Carmello
Cherokee Purple
Earl's Faux
Green Giant
Isis Candy
Lime Green Salad
Matina
Opalka
Paul Robeson
Rutgers
Sun Gold

Last year, I was a brand new gardener, I had pots on my apt. patio. Brandywine, Cherokee Purple way outperformed my two hybrids (Big Beef and Champion), I didn't know what I was doing when I picked out my plants. This time around have learned a lot more but both of those heirlooms did so well for me, I wouldn't do it without them this year.

Depending on how much space I end up with, other plantings hoped for here and there: Basil, mint, cilantro, lettuces, bell peppers, hot peppers, musk melon & watermelon, cucumbers, carrots, celery. I already have an Avocado tree, Meyer Lemon tree, and Peach tree on the property. Would like to get in some blackberry and raspberry vines soon too. I've ordered a few used books from Amazon on SoCal Gardening, edible landscape, companion planting so it's going to be a very exciting time for me. Another thing I need to figure out is what my composting setup is going to be like.

Good thing the house itself will need only a little work because I'm going to be busy outside this summer!

Thanks everyone! Hope you are all kicking off the season well!

[Ruby]

How exciting! Welcome to the neighborhood!

Not exactly what you need, but a good start:
http://www.lacity.org/san/srecd/free_mulch.htm
http://ladpw.org/epd/sg/bc_bins.cfm

[tomgirletc]

Hey thanks Ruby, I had tried different LA City links to find dead links everywhere.

Have you or other SoCal dwellers had experience getting mulch from the LA city distribution stations yourself? The flyer says "organic" but I'm a bit troubled with the idea that some weed killer may have contaminated the stuff they have.

I'm not afraid of using it if I hear of others who have had positive experience.

[feldon30]

I would resist the temptation as long as you can to buy bagged topsoil. It is just "filler" and will weigh down your soil and depending, it may really hurt your drainage.

If you can find a local soil company that doesn't seem like a scam artist who will deliver a soil mix for you with at least 25% compost, I'd go for that. A nice, light soil mix full of peat, bark, and compost is best of course. They like to skimp on the compost. If you offer to pay extra, they will usually sweeten it for you. I bought a soil mix and the texture was perfect but it had no "goodies" in it, so I had to add several bags of premium composted cow manure to it, negating any savings.

If you are starting small scale, maybe twelve tomato plants in two 3' x 12' beds, then you could buy blocks of compressed potting mix (Pro-Mix), bags of compressed peat, bags of high-quality compost or if all they have is that $1.99 low-quality stuff at Wal-Mart, go to a feed store and buy bags of composted cow, sheep, or rabbit manure, and bags of untreated, undyed pine bark and make a very nice soil mix yourself.

[Ruby]

I think a better bet might be this Griffith Park compost. This link is for an event, but you could try calling to see what they have. This is actual compost, whereas the "mulch" link I posted before is only "partially composted" (whatever that means).

http://www.lacity.org/san/bc-worksho...2007-04-28.htm

I haven't used any of this, I think there were some restrictions on being a resident of the City of Los Angeles (which I am not, but you will be!).

But, of course, you could always buy soil to start. Might be kind of neat to look up raised bed gardening and start from scratch with manure, straw and whatever else people put in to compost. Of course, you'd have to wait a few months to plant, but it might be worth it.

[tomgirletc]

Yeah, Ruby, I don't think I could wait for the fresh lasagna to do it's thing, I really want to plant ASAP!
Thanks for the additional link on compost, there are server problems currently but I've noticed that compost station at Griffith Park before. I wonder if it comes from composting all the horse manure from the stables?

Thanks Feldon, I didn't even think about a business that sells soil mixes and would actually bring it in for me. Sounds a little expensive but it seems I can at least get compost and mulch for free/super cheap.

I'm not sure how big the beds will be...have yet to score materials for building yet. I guess maybe I will call a bunch of contractors and ask for composite wood scraps.

[Ruby]

I can't find the link now, but I'm vaguely recalling seeing the source of that griffith park compost as waste from the zoo, city landscape trimming and, well, sewage. Compost is compost though, I guess.

There must be some construction going on around there, you could probably just go to a site and ask if you can dig through their dumpster or something.

Good luck and keep us posted on your progress!

[landarc]

There are many soil companies in Soutern California, as well as larger garden supply stores that sell basic raw topsoil as well as topsoil mixes that will work fine for you. I havent done a project down that way for years, so cannot provide a link. Typically, the garden centers all have their own mix that they feel works the best. The larger topsoil supply quarries tend to have more generci mixes that will require additional compost and fertilizer to plump up the quality of the soil. All of these soils will be based on the typical Southern California Alluvial soils and should be fine for pH and other considerations. Since you will be in raised beds, almost any topsoil you get should be a loamy sand with plenty or organic material and compost to guard against compaction. Good luck on your new garden.

[dice]

There is what I think of as "the HC method". You
need lots of big burlap sacks (may be available
at feed stores, fruit and vegetable markets, farm
supply stores, big espresso places, etc) and a big
pile of aged horse manure.

The idea is to fill the sacks with horse manure,
lay them out end-to-end where you want your
raised beds to be, cut crosses in the middle of
whatever turns out to be the top side, and
plant tomato plants in there. HC fertilized with
water-soluble tomato food at transplant time
and when they first started to set fruit.

Water passes through the burlap, so it poses
no problem for watering. It is mostly weedless.
If the plants root right through the bottom of
the burlap into the soil, no problem, that just
provides more minerals for the plants. You can
drive a wood, bamboo, or metal stake through
burlap if staking the plants individually.

After harvest, he built low walls around the lines
of burlap sacks and dumped in composted leaf
mulch, grass clippings, etc, and more horse manure,
turning them into raised beds. The burlap breaks
down and composts, too, so you can just leave
those in there.

You do need to find the burlap sacks and horse
manure somewhere. I would mix in a little Dolomite
lime, too, when filling the bags. This gives you all
summer to accumulate materials for the sides of
the raised beds, find sources of free compostable
materials to mix in with the manure, etc.

I have read that rabbit and llama manure can be
used without aging or composting them first
without problems, but horse manure is usually
more plentiful and often free if you have a truck
to haul it with, and it should "age" pretty fast
sitting out in the sun inside burlap sacks in a
warm climate.

[tomgirletc]

Wow, thanks so much for all the super helpful tips! You guys are the best! Seriously. Tremendous!

[Magwart]

Hi, Tomgirletc --

I'm a lurker usually, but I can give you a very specific info for where you live because I'm only a few miles away. First, congrats on closing on your new home!! Building good soil in a new home is a slow process requiring much patience and several years, but you'll look back on it someday as time and money well spent.

I recommend that you start off your composting adventure by looking into LA County's free composting seminars. They're good at teaching the basics. They also distribute good-quality, heavily subsidized small compost bins, if you want one of those. The big bonus though is that they also teach vermicomposting and distribute "worm farms" to keep in your garage (with a pound of "starter worms"!). It doesn't take long to get your first usable "castings" from the worms.

The very best thing you can do for your soil is order a load of mulch delivered from Tim Dundon (a/k/a "the Compost King"), just up the hill from you in Altadena -- www.2doo.com . (The website is flakey -- if it doesn't load, try again in a few days, or google his name and "2doo" for his phone number and info about him on other sites). The "doo" in "2doo" stands for just what you might expect (horse manure). It's not top soil, and it's not a quick-fix solution for planting this year -- but it's the long-term, real solution to bad soil in our area. It's amazing stuff. He supplies the family at Path to Freedom in Pasadena, an urban farming project that grew 3 tons of food on a 1/10 acre normal-sized residential lot. (Info about the project is here: http://www.pathtofreedom.com/about/urbanhomestead.shtml ).

Tim's a local gardening legend. You'll find lots of stories about him and his "doo" online. You are close enough that I'm sure you could talk him into bringing you some of his "magic mulch" -- tell him you are a new gardener, and if you're lucky, he'll stop and chat for an hour when he brings the load. He's a master gardener with the heart of a teacher (he looks like Santa, and sometimes talks in rhyme!). He's in the mulch business because he wants to save the planet one garden at a time, and he's a soil evangelist.

Tim's stuff is also inexpensive (a load costs far, far less than it would in a garden center by the bag). If you want someone to shovel it around your yard's planting beds and save the back-breaking work, call Norman Brothers Tree Experts in Altadena (they are Tim's neighbors), and they'll provide that service for a reasonable charge.

As tough as it is to wait, I would make do with whatever you can this summer, and wait until next fall, when the rain comes again, before having a load delivered. The stuff stinks and is very "hot" when he delievers it. What he delivers now contains fresh and "uncooked" horse manure. It is straight from local racing horse stables that use forestry products (shaved wood chips), instead of hay, in their barns. The horses do their business on the wood chips, stomp around in it to mix it up and grind down the chips. And then Tim delivers it, still steaming, right to your house. Because of its "raw" state, I prefer to let it sit for a few months before planting anything I'm going to eat in it.

A load of this stuff is probably 25% horse manure (and urine), and 75% wood chips in various states of decay. It smells very strongly of ammonia for about the first week, and you have to water it in daily to get the smell down, cool it off, and keep it from burning any tender plants you put it around (the rain we get in fall/winter helps enormously). The smell vanishes entirely after about the first week, and then as the "nuggets" wash in, the magic starts.

If you spread a thick layer around all your beds, it will slowly work wonders for your soil over the course of about a year. I'm in my fourth year using this stuff (I get a load every fall, and after the second and third years, I tilled in whatever was left from the previous year before the new load arrived). It is amazing how it transforms the soil. My soil was hard, nearly barren and just plain awful when I started in this house. The soil underneath last fall's load is rich, dark and gorgeous. The mulch holds water beautifully too.

Tim is your answer. His solution works slowly, but if you are patient, you'll love your soil next year, and it just gets better and better every year after that.

-Magwart

PS -- Since you are close by, I may help you out with free seedlings for at least a couple of the varieties you mentioned. (Some folks here have been very kind in sharing seeds with me, and I believe in paying the favor forward.) I'll PM you with a list of my seedling "orphans", and you can let me know if you want them.

[feldon30]

I'm sure it's a great product, but I wonder why Tim doesn't age it before delivering it. No room to do so, I guess?

[Magwart]

Yup, that's exactly right. It's actually a very sad story. He used to have the greatest organic compost pile in Southern California -- several stories tall, nearly an acre wide, populated by foraging chickens and geese. Homeless guys also came to sleep on it in winter to keep warm. It was lovely golden-colored stuff that smelled wonderful. Local gardeners for years were welcome to show up with a truck or wheel barrow and help themselves. After decades of fighting with the land owner and county over its size, The Pile was completely bulldozed last year. He no longer maintains a pile.

What distributes now isn't as good as what came from The Pile, but it's still works wonderfully so long as you water it in well, and you don't plant tender new plants in it right away (after a few months, seeds sprout like mad in it, though).

[tomgirletc]

Wow, Magwart, this is a fascinating story and sounds like this is definitely what I'm looking for in the autumn. What month do you usually schedule his visit?

I think I am going to do that feedsack method to get started this summer. I might give this guy a call when I am putting my sacks together. I will probably get a smaller amount of manure than the poster suggested because I'm not going to have time to let the manure do it's thing. I'm thinking I'll fill the feedbags with a mix of topsoil from a soil company that has a good amount of compost, some compost from Griffith park, some rinsed seaweed that I get from the beach and a little bit of manure, maybe from the fellow you recommend. I'm going to put the filled up feedsacks down over a layer of dampened soggy cardboard that I'm going to put down as soon as I unpack a few boxes. I'll let the feedsacks sit for a few days in their spot and them cut them open and put my plants in as long as they don't seem too hot and hope it goes well. I'll mulch with city mulch too I think.

I'll collect wood scraps or composite wood scraps over the summer and start my composting and worm bins over the summer. I already have a city composting class on my calendar. I'm going to consider setting up a drip irrigation set up over the summer too as it all starts to fall in place. I like the idea of rain barrels too, will figure that out in time. I'll be checking craigslist all summer looking for good things for the garden. I might even get a couple of rabbits so I can start getting a supply of their good stuff too. I wish I had more trees to give me leaves. I will be letting the avocado tree leaves lie, otherwise it's just two Magnolias, a lemon, an orange and a peachtree. I don't think any one of those will give me much but maybe I will have a neighbor who will have leaves to spare in the fall.

I think this year I'm just going to get around to tomatoes and herbs, maybe will get in some sort of blackberries after I pull out whatever other vines are out there. I like jasmine a lot but I'm big on the idea of edible landscape. Next year will do a lot more since the beds should be in better shape.

Obviously, I'm more excited over the fact of having a garden then the whole house thing but it's just that time of year!!!

Thanks again everyone, you guys are wonderful. Magwart, I sent you a pm regarding your kind seedling offer.

[Thawley]

Bringing this thread back from the dead...

I am building 2 - 3'x19x2' raised beds and need to find 7-8 yards of soil to fill them. I'm in the North Santa Ana/Orange area.

Any suggestions for local soil companies with the "right stuff"?