The Best Soil Mix For Healthier Vegetables In Raised Garden Beds

Raised beds are a fantastic gardening option. Not only do they solve any issues you may be having with gardening in the ground, like poor drainage or compaction, but they also make it easier for those with mobility issues to tend gardens. Of course, you may have thought that once you finished building your raised beds, the hard part was over. In fact, you still have an important decision to make: What will you use to fill the beds?

There is a wide range of fantastic soil recipes for creating thriving raised bed gardens. One mix that has been shown to work extremely well long term is advised by Rutgers' New Jersey Agriculture Experiment Station, which recommends using a combination of compost and your native soil to fill the beds. This can be at a ratio of about 7 parts soil to 3 parts compost according to Penn State Extension. Just make sure to test your soil before adding it to your raised bed to confirm that it isn't contaminated and to learn what, if any, nutrients or additional amendments you should add. 

The advantage of including native soil whenever possible is that it contains natural minerals that can help with the soil's structure and benefit root growth. It also provides better long-term results than many other raised bed mixes. If you don't have native soil on your property to add to your raised bed, you can also use topsoil sourced from a reputable landscape company. 

If your raised beds are especially deep and require a lot of soil to fill, you may want to consider adding old logs, sticks, and other organic material to the bottom of the beds to take up some of the space. This technique saves money and is reminiscent of the traditional Central and Eastern European Hugelkultur method. You then want to make sure your combination of native soil and compost is mixed together well. If your soil test suggested additional amendments were needed, then these should also be combined into the mix. Most vegetables grow best with a pH between 5.8 and 6.5, so you may need to add sulfur to overly basic soil to lower the pH.

You can then finish your raised bed by adding a layer of mulch to the top of the soil mix. This will help keep temperatures more stable and limit water loss. Now you're finally ready to plant things in your raised vegetable bed and enjoy watching your veggies grow and thrive.