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LANDSCAPING AND FILL Winter is past, and the mini-Gobi in our back yard could really use some decent topsoil on it to promote growth. Alas, we've just gotten terminally frustrated with the nice-but-overlame guy who did the septic work, so we're looking to have someone show up with a dump truck full of topsoil and spread it around. Given the generally awful reputation of landscaping contractors, I'm somewhat leary of just picking names out of the yellow pages; recommendations would be welcome. We've also thought about doing this ourselves, but the logistics are quite formidable. Still, we might just head over to the despot and pick up enough forty-pound bags to do the garden, and let the rest of the yard fend for itself with minimal assistance. (Is there a better source for bulk topsoil?) Whadyall think? --andrew We're in the same situation. The results of the leaching field installed 2 years ago are grim... all the topsoil has sifted down, and we're left with a very rocky surface with a lot of scrub. I'd love to cover the 25' x 80' section of ground with 4-6" of topsoil. Hmm. that'd be... 1000 cubic feet of dirt... 10x10x10? 2 dumptrucks or thereabouts? The next question is moving it around - a neighbor has one of those neat little 4wd frontloaders which he says he will come over and use if we ask (for like $20/hour). I don't think you want the 40' bag thingies. we just got a bunch - at $2 each, with about 2 cubic feet of soil in them, to cover that area we'd need 500 of 'em, $1000. Thanks, no. :) Anyone got ideas? --Dave Belfer-Shevett I'm building much garden space here in Medford, so I'm gonna need topsoil too. I've been buying some randomly and have about 15 + bags of topsoil, 10+ of humus (how do you pronounce "humus" anyway?) and a big chunk/bag of peat in addition to bone meal and other soil conditionors. Best price for topsoil is $1.29 at Osco's Drug store. Humus is also $1.29 there, but they seem to only have a few bags out at a time, so I get theem like 5 at a time. This is a 40 pound bag. I think the despot has it at likke $1.59 for topsoil and $1.69 or $1.79 for humus. I also hear that some towns have an area where you can drive your vehicle to the town compost heap and shovel in whatever you need. I'm hoping to make a run to one of those places one the garden is ready for soil. Until then, I buy bags.. Anyone know where I can acquire a bunch of small stones, for drainage in my new garden? I figure, I shoudl probably do it right... --karyn > (how do you pronounce "humus" anyway?) hyewmus. Not like the middle-eastern food, hummus. > Anyone know where I can acquire a bunch of small stones, for drainage in my new garden? You're joking, right? New England's number one crop is stones. Try finding Bay State Sand & Gravel in the yellow pages, and you should have lots of sources. That's if you don't want pretty stuff from a quarry. Or we just bought a $2 cubic-foot bag of inch stones from some garden place for lining flowerpots. We don't seem to break pots often enough. I'm all ears for contractors too. (Unless jrp wants to spend a saturday in Concord with Rosie for some appropriate compensation, that is.) That yew hedge is _still_ defacing my front yard. When it's gone there will be a (probably prettier) trench left in its place that will need filling, too. -dca Did this in the distant past (when my folks destroyed their back yard by building an extension on their house) and more recently (converted the sand-and-weeds strip next to our TD into a lush garden). Observations: Get a truck. You will need TONS of topsoil to make any dent. Did a small city garden with about a truck worth of dirt (folks) and another truck with sand and gravel; our garden was a 7 year incremental project that involved (est.) 5 bags topsoil and 5 manure plus one jumbo peatmoss and a bale of saltmarsh hay PER YEAR, PLUS many, many, many cans of household and garden compost (think food for 10 people * 7 years...) all to get a 6'x40' side yard to be 8" in real topsoil, and it wasnt that bad to begin with...yellow pages is probably OK for this. Think about lead. If your house is old, the dirt near the house will be contaminated. We just mixed in stuff, and as a result our lovely garden is marginal for veggies and the baby can't play in it. It's not a big deal; just bury leady dirt under new dirt or mulch and grow non-edible things on it. If the whole lot is dubious, do raised beds for veggies, see previous thread... Do it yourself - the truck(s) will dump big piles of sand, gravel, and dirt in your front yard/driveway; wheelbarrow it into place. This is good exercise. Go to garden stores and nurseries: Mahoneys ($), Osco (?), Rick's in Somerville (best) or whereever and pick out plants, not all at once, and stick em in. Some will die. The strong (i.e. the ones adapted to your conditions and plant-tending skills...) will live. You will have years of excuse to be outside on weekends... --hugh > Anyone got ideas? Yeah. Stop fighting Nature. Lawns are not particularly natural. If your terrain won't retain topsoil, dumping a thousand bucks worth of the stuff on it is probably pointless. Find an aesthetic that works with the terrain you bought and use that instead of some Beaver-Cleaver-inspired ChemLawn-sucking intrusion into the natural ecology. In Austin, there was (is) this thing called Xeriscape, which is designed precisely to work within the confines of that semi-desert climate and produce very pretty, very functional lanscapes. I'm sure there's something comparable for this part of the world. Plant clover. Grow moss (ever walked barefoot on moss? it is *way* cool) put in some pine trees and scrub bushes which will break up that rock for you. Yes, it will take a while. Try to think in terms of what you're creating for your child. --Alan, feeling Viridian today > In Austin, there was (is) this thing called Xeriscape, If anyone out there has some sources of info for this sort of thing (especially for New England), I'd be interested in hearing about them. Ideally, it should be adaptable to an urban-sized lot and reasonably dog/child -friendly/-proof. --Bearpaw Well, you can start at the Cambridge, MA public library, where there's a book titled "Xeriscaping". It details how to design landscapes to use a minimum amount of water, how to water plants efficiently, and which plants are best adapted to xeriscaping in different regions of the US. It also gives amusing details about the water-usage of different garden plants; did you know that tomatoes produce more fruit if they're slightly water-starved, and fear for their little vegetable lives? "Xeriscaping" is, like "terracing" or "tilling," a name for a set of techniques, not one particular landscape set-up, by the way. Standard garden folks, like the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the New England Wildflower Society and so on ought to know about it. If they don't, tell me, and I'll go yell at them. You might also try looking under the "Associations" section of the book "Gardening by Mail," (which also has a good selection of pawpaw suppliers) --Meg, who works madly to make her peat-bog backyard a bit less moist. p.s. Inadvertant xeriscaping tip; when Scott and I travelled to Wyoming, I was amused to see Blue Flax flowers - which loved our dry, infertile Somerville yard - thriving in near-desert conditions. It made me feel better about the fact that I never watered them. >Stop fighting Nature. agreed; OTOH most urban/suburban lots took what was natural, striped it, and dumped the clay and gravel from the house-foundation hole on top of it. So trying a little repair is not really cheating... Here here for long-term thinking - see previous note about compost... And (chem)lawns suck...having let natural selection decide which perennial and self-reseeding flowering plants belong in a dryish new england side lot*, and having these fit plants take over the whole thing, we think of grass as a weed; grass is in fact very fit, but its the 3-ft-tall with a tassle on top kind, not anything resembling a lawn. *didnt follow any book system (looking forward to any posts on these), but results pretty good anyway- we call it the Darwin Garden. Some zero-maintenance winners that I know the name of: Sunflowers (die in the fall but reseed - one little hardware store seed
packet has gone 7 years now, and its fun to watch them mutate - they seem
to be very genetically unstable) Most bulboids coexist with these by coming up first and being dormant by the time competition gets really mean: Croc,i Dafs, Tulips, Hyasynths, (sp?) gladioli, (come up later but use the bulb energy to get really tall...) Beware: Mint family plants and most vines (e.g. honeysuckle) are TOO fit. We use a machete (literally) once a year or so on these... Also, if there are any trees, maples especially, within seed dropping range, and you have any soil at all, you will have to argue with nature about how deep a forest you want... --Hugh L. McManus > Lawns are not particularly natural. If your terrain won't retain topsoil, dumping a thousand bucks worth of the stuff on it is probably pointless. Thang you bagwhan Wex. You have successfully taken the least favorable view of what we are trying to accomplish, built yourself a moral mountain for yourself so that you may look down upon the world, and succeeded in making an ass of yourself. Had you actually read what I posted, you would note that rthe reason this particular stretch of yard was barren with rocks was that the local plumbing (or whatever they're called) guys came in and put a leeching field in, where there was lovely mountain grass vefore (see? Mountain grass. Very high density, short, and grows just about anywhere, but takes a very long time.) These mental giants just stripped away the top layer of grass (piling it in the corner of the yard, where it promptly turned into a pile of weeds as all the soil was washed out of it), and troweled over the leeching field. This results in settling - where the rocky soil now no longer has cohesion, and the topsoil (the stuff that things grow in, in case you missed it), either settles under the rocks or gets washed away. We would like to replace the topsoil, so things can grow there again, rather than have it look like the slag pile for a blast furnace. No chemicals. No fighting nature. We're on the same side. Now, that being said, Mr. Boardman has mentioned that topsoil runs about $4.00 a cubic yard. That should be about 27 cubic feet of topsoil - and I think (trying to remember my original numbers - 20' by about 80', 1600 sq feet at about 6" depth, 800 cubic feet, ~ 30 cubic yards, running about $120. Not too shabby, we can do that. Next step. Where to find a truck, and a small tractor to push it around? --Dave Belfer-Shevett Yeah, "Stop fighting Nature" seems questionable in this context. The leeching field is already a result of massive human intervention, and adding more intervention to bring it back to where it was doesn't seem like a problem. There is an appropriate balance between the wilderness environmental ethic ("Just don't touch it!") and the construction environmental "ethic" ("Pave the Earth!"); a book called "Second Nature", by Michael Pollan gives some fun and thought provoking musings on this subject. It's about gardening and a gardening ethic. (Don't expect it to be too thought provoking; he's an associate editor at Harper's, and can write very well, but tends to write in the Harper's engaging tidbit style). Unfortunately, I have no useful information to add to the debate about topsoil. -- Randy I recently heard an interview with someone who had some interesting ideas on this topic. One problem with the idea of preserving or reconstructing wilderness is that natural ecosystems are in a constant state of change, so how do you decide what to preserve? This guys belief was that the Native Americans produced significant change to the North American ecosystem when they migrated over (causing the extinction of the Mammoth, the Saber Tooth, tapirs, etc)* and that we should try to set aside a chunk of land to rebuild and preserve as a pre-human North American ecosystem. He'd bring over existing large animals (like Indian tigers and African elephants and tapirs) that are similar to what was in North America before the first people. It is kind of wacky, and will probably never happen, but it would be pretty cool. Of course, if you're not satisfied with the stand in animals, there is always genetic engineering! --scott * Yes, I know that it is still somewhat controversial as to whether the Native Americans killed off these large animals. I, for one, am convinced though. Compare with Australia. Your comments put me in mind of another book recommendation: _Changes in the Land_ by William Cronon. It's about the different ways that Native Americans and European settlers used the land, and how their economic systems drove a lot of the conflict between them (concepts of property, boundaries, land usages). Cronon does combined economic and ecological history, and I find him absolutely fascinating. But boy have we wandered off topic. I sentence myself to twenty lashes with a wet noodle for innapropriate book recommendations (this one; the last one had some shred of relevance to the list) and I'll stop spouting now .... -- Randy > This results in settling - where the rocky soil now no longer has cohesion, and the topsoil (the stuff that things grow in, in case you missed it), either settles under the rocks or gets washed away. Well, wait a second. Why are you trucking in new topsoil only to watch it disappear into the rocks?? Seems to me that you ought to fill the spaces between the rocks with something cheaper than topsoil, like sand. Or if that's not possible, then put down filter fabric first and hope that the roots of the grass will hold the topsoil first and hope that the roots of the grass will hold the topsoil together. --russ nelson Where did the $4.00 / cubic yard price come from? If it's from a $2.00 per 40 pound bag price, I have found the bags at $1.29 at Osco's. This should reduce the price to less than $90 if my quick math is accurate (and I am sure it is not) How much *is* a truckload of topsoil, delivered, anyway? --karyn Remember that a 40lb bag is really 3-4 cubic feet (less? I'm really tired). A cubic -yard- is about 27 cubic feet. so, if I were to go to Osco and buy bags, that would be around 7 bags per cubic yard, at $1.29 per bag, or around $9.20 per cubic yard. However, looking around at various websites, i find these pages... http://www.jonesfuel.com/ 25cy
del: $447.00 --Dave Belfer-Shevett NO, NOT $4 Remember that a 40lb bag is really 3-4 cubic feet (less? I'm really tired). Someone (Karyn?) posited them as being 2 cubic feet, so that's $17.50 per cubic yard, about the same as jonesfual.com, and probably nicer than the stuff that'll come in a dump truck. Still, they deliver it... With regard to bulk prices: one of us dropped a bit somewhere; I spent a while on the phone today with the town health/building inspector who presided over our new septic system last year and who knows the local construction scene cold. She said that the cheapest and also quite possibly best approach is to find a construction company digging up topsoil on a local project, and contract with them to have some of it come straight to our yard; the going price for this is $6-$9/cy. Still, even with the worst-case scenario, we can get 25cy from jonesfuel for under $500, which is about half a house unit last I checked! --andrew > Well, wait a second. Why are you trucking in new topsoil only to watch it disappear into the rocks?? A good point, but I think what I've seen there now is the settling after the tear-up of the leeching field installation. Once the grass layer was stripped away, they churned upt he rocks and what dirt was left, installed the piping, and just troweled it back into place. As it all settled, the rocks naturally 'percolated' to the top. It's all settled now (quite solid in fact - this was done 2 years ago), so I think another layer of (not necessarily hyper-fine) topsoil would give grass and the like something to root into. --Dave Belfer-Shevett "unscreened clean fill" probably includes broken glass, rocks, nails, and not a whole lot of organic matter. --russ nelson to my incomplete knowledge, 'clean fill' is for filling holes and swamps, and could be anything non-toxic, including busted concrete, clay, gravel, infertile subsoil...best ask... -h My former landlord was annoyed when he got a bunch of fill for his backyard. He tried planting grass on top of the fill, but it turned out that the fill was filled with violets. They tried taking over his back yard. --Ben How can I get some of that fill? I'm planting violets in the front yard in the hopes that they'll do just that... Our front yard is mainly moss, with enough grassy weeds to look unkempt and need occasional mowing. Violets would be a welcome addition. At least the septic install in the back yard got rid of the legacy grass back there that needed frequent mowing (quite a job with a manual reel mower, that's for sure). Once we get enough top soil to restore the veggie garden (the primary Title V casualty), I figure we'll let the rest fend for itself. But right now, it sure is ugly; "mini-gobi" describes it pretty well, since all the sand that used to be down below is now on top. BTW, I wanted to thank folks for the pointers to xeriscaping. Didn't know there was a name for something I've been trying to do all along... (Besides, I hate lawn care.) --T.B. A friend of mine does landscaping work in the Littleton/Acton/Concord area: Moragh Ramage (978)772-1815 She prefers to do stoneworks and low-water-use plantings and ground covers... she doesn't like to do lawns but pay her enough and she might. Mind you I've never seen her landscaping work, but if she's as much a perfectionist there as she is with her music, you won't be sorry 8-) --Jim Paradis
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