Raised-bed gardeners can fill their growing boxes with ideal soil even when the surrounding environment is wet muck, baked clay, or shovel-breaking rocks. Whether you buy your initial load of soil to fill your raised beds, or make your own by amending your local dirt with organic matter, raised beds will help prevent your ideal garden soil from washing away or compacting, ensuring prolific vegetable and flower results.
Garden Soil Components
The ideal garden soil is loose and crumbly, drains well, and is chock full of nutrient-containing organic material to support garden plant root structures. Good garden soil contains millions of living organisms in every spoonful, including bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and strands of fungi. Compost, manure and leaf mold should constitute at least half by volume of the soil used to fill a raised bed.
Purchased and Local Soils
Most garden supply vendors and landscaping firms sell topsoil and compost products, but the quality of these items can vary widely. Purchased compost may well be full of weed seeds, and purchased topsoil might be anything from rich gardening earth to unidentifiable chunks of unusable fill.
Take a good look at any soil you buy for your raised beds at the source before you commit to the purchase. Your local soil has the advantage of being free, and already at the garden site, but it may take a few years to develop an initial batch of compost large enough to make a significant addition to your raised bed soil.
A good compromise for getting started is to purchase manure, preferably from a small dairy, horse, or poultry farm--rabbit manure is ideal if you can find it--and mix it with your local soil along with other organic matter like peat moss or shredded leaves. Mix in sand and gypsum if your local soil is heavy clay, and double up on the amount of peat moss you add if the soil is already sandy.
Bring local or purchased soil to an extension service office for an inexpensive test to determine soil pH and nutrient profile and get recommendations for any other adjustments needed to your raised bed soil. Raised beds will ensure that your soil amendments do not just wash out of the garden area, as the frequently do in ground-level gardens.
Soil Structure and Maintenance
Soil in raised beds can maintain its airy structure because no one is walking on the ground and compacting it. Protect this soil structure by placing boards across the beds, resting on the side walls, if you need to step into the middle of the beds, and stand on these boards instead of the soil.
Tilling is unnecessary and disturbs the complex environment which develops in a health raised bed. Mulch your raised bed crops each year with a layer of organic matter--straw, shredded leaves, compost--and leave the mulch layer to decay. Worms, fungi, and micro-organisms will grow into the mulch layer and draw it down into the raised bed soil, bringing nutrients straight to the roots of your garden plants. Feed your raised bed soil with compost, and it will feed you with rich garden produce.
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