The Thirst Mutilator

With square foot gardening, you're filling your raised beds with a special blend of vermiculite, peat, and compost. Bartholemew suggests 1/3 of each. Austin Natural Gardener lets you buy compost by the pound, which was helpful and cost-effective, though I had to fill the bags myself. I did some calculations, basing it on a 5' x 5', 8" deep square. For the specific types, I bought:

"Revitalizer" (sold by Austin Natural Gardener), an excellent, fine compost, and it is a mix of 5 types of their compost (it was self-serve):

Vermiculite:


And peat moss:

I had already bought two other types of compost, plus Dillo Dirt! at Home Depot because you don't want homogeneous compost. I also picked up some other soils for a few projects (more later). Here are my materials:

Mel suggests mixing the components on a tarp, however the amount I needed would mean that I would have to mix 6-7 batches in the tarp. I settled for 2 batches and I eyeballed 1/3 of vermiculite, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 peat moss, mixing them with a rake and then again mixing them in the actual box:

unmixed components

close-up of post-mixture soil

I filled the box, then made a lattice from the woven nylon cord:

The soil cost around $175.00 and, in retrospect I bought too much for my box. I ended up with a whole extra bag of vermiculite (4 cu/ft per bag), almost a whole extra bag of peat moss (3.8 cu/ft per bag), and about 5 extra bags of compost (about 8 gallons/ bag). What can I say...my math sucks. The peat moss I can definitely use for a bunch of things, including blueberries, the compost will also be useful, but the vermiculite will be tough to use up. Anyone have suggestions?