You're right about the chips robbing the soil of nitrogen. Depending on what you're growing it might work. On the container forum they discuss a blend of pine bark + other ingredients. A load of the sawdust piled up & mixed with a green like grass clippings or plant waste will be good to add to your soils about a year if you turn it now & then. Sometimes, manures come with sawdust bedding, so that is a good combination to compost for further use. What kind of plants would this new raised bed be for growing? Are you filling a new bed or topping off an existing bed? A sandy loam topsoil mix + 6" organic matter would be a good way to go if you need to plant right away in this bed. Use compost or composted manures and mulch with dried grass clippings, shredded leaves, chopped straw, used coffee grounds, etc. If you're growing vegetables, you also might want to add some pumice like you said and a complete organic fertilizer. Over time you won't need as much fertilizer to grow great vegetables. Each year continue to add more organic matter to build the soil you want to use for your gardening. It takes a lot of it to keep up the soil, so it's nice to build some home compost piles for a good supply. You could also compost in place in & around your existing vegetation in perennial or shrub beds. I'm in western WA and we also have glatial till, so that when you dig a hole you get a pile of rocks. Those rocks are moved elsewhere in our landscape. Eventually the annual vegetable bed areas have become good soil for our perennial fruits like raspberries and strawberries. Our technique has varied over the years, but usually we've sheet mulched with manures and bedding in the fall piling up to 12" on a bed then turned in the spring. Plant & mulch. By summer's end it's shrunk again, so more sheet mulching. It's amazing how much organic matter is used up. In my garden boxes with wooden sides I also add compost whenever I harvest a crop then replant. In fall apply manures, used coffee grounds, and lime. In spring I've done different things different years depending on my energy level. Remove mulch to the sides before planting transplants. Rake smoothish & plant. Turn over with garden fork, rake & plant. For direct sowing seeds I rake a bit more later in spring or cover with a slight layer of screened compost to smooth out the bed. It always seems to work. For perennial and shrub mixed borders we just mounded the soil with the layers of compost ingredients and after a few months planted through the layers. We've spread mulch 2x a year since and those are much easier to work beds. Where we had existing vegetation that soil is still quite hard & rocky. As I move things around I come upon that rocky slippery stuff and add a lot more compost to a section when replanting. I hope that helps ~ Corrine

Kill any grub you find. I just kiiled over a dozen in my 15 gal. container. My Trinidad scorpion has roots only where there weren't grubs. I was wondering why my plant wouldn't fruit and kept droppint it's leaves.Grubs ate 3/4 of it's roots. the grubs are from japanese beetles/june bugs-dayglow blue... Whenever I have a healthy plant go bad all of a sudden for what seems like no reason it ends up being the grubs eating the roots. Nematodes didn't do anything when I tried them. I now look for holes that look like someone poked their finger in the potting soil.There is allways a grub 2 - 3 inches under the hole.They come uo at night... The grubs live for 1 year in the soil then turn into junebugs. Grubs seem to really like soil with a lot of organics in them. When I repotted a 20 gal. container I stopped counting after killing 65 grubs and I had only gone through 2/3rds of the soil. Nasty plant killing suckers,kill them all.

Mel's mix does not use top soil. It is 1/3 peat moss, 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost from as many sources as you can find: like mushroom, leaf, worm castings, cow manure. I have used dehydrated and composted cow and can't tell the difference. I would hesitate to use community compost because you don't know if it has been heated enough to destroy plant diseases. The first garden soil you make is expensive, but then you have great soil for the rest of the years. Keski

If I were to use the raised beds, one of the crops I would plant in them would be tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants (not necessarily all in the same bed). When Preparing Tomato bed apply 3 lbs. of tomato tone per 50 sq feet and work into top 4”-6” of soil. I found a PDF for tomato tone, and these are the instructions it gives for how to use it: For Single plants mix 3 T (tablespoons)of tomato tone into the soil when planting For potted plants, mix one part tomato tone to 30 parts soil mixture (1.5 cups tomato tone for every 8 quarts of soil) FEEDING: Apply tomato tone after plants are well established (10-14 days after planting) and then twice a month during growing season (May-Aug) ROWS: 1 cup each side per 5’ of row Single Plants:3 T per plant Potted plants: Apply 1.5 t per 4” diameter pot (1.5 T per 12” diameter) The thing I am confused about is it doesn't give any instructions for how much to use in a raised bed; the closest I get is 'apply 3 lbs. per 50 sq feet'. Is the area of a raised bed (by 'area' I mean how much soil it can hold) square feet or cubic feet? I am pretty sure it's square feet, but I can't remember, so I wanted to double check to be sure. Also a really dumb question but what do you mean by 'top soil'? There are bags labelled 'top soil' and other bags labelled 'potting mix' (potting mix would more akin to miracle gro/something similar). Which one should I use? Also how much can you actually grow in a 4' x 8' raised bed with plants? I realize this depends on what you're growing in the raised bed but for me it'd be veggies. The veggies (no I am not growing to grow all of them at once nor am I going to grow all of them in the same bed) would be: *Greens (lettuce, spinach, arugula, watercress, baby kale) *Brassicas (cabbage, napa cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli) *Root veggies (turnip, daikon [large white Asian radish], carrots, potatoes) *Zucchini *Winter squash (only one variety, butternut) *Tomatoes (slicers, cherry, and romas/paste) (please specify how many plants, both trellised and untrellised I'd be able to grow in a 4' x 8' bed; most of mine are indeterminate varieties, but some are determinate varieties, specifically the cherry tomatoes) *Eggplant *Peppers (both sweet bell and hot chile varieties) *Snap beans (bush type) *Snap Peas (both pole type and the variety that don't require trellising) *Herbs (flat leaf parsley, rosemary, basil, culantro [it's similar in flavor to cilantro but it's NOT cilantro, it's much stronger in flavor]) Also I am wondering, can you grow corn in a raised bed? I know it's generally not advised to grow it in a raised bed, but the variety I have is a dwarf type (by dwarf, it's 2'-3') and says right on the pkt that it can be grown in containers.