A raised bed? Raised beds are very forgiving, and the physics and biology are very different from that of containers. There are other forums that will help you out a lot more than this one. Is the horse manure / cow manure fresh? Most kinds of manure, and especially horse manure, needs to be composted with "brown" material before it can be used by plants.. otherwise it will burn them. You can get away with small amounts mixed in. The compost and pine bark fines are great soil amendments for raised beds, but you may want to get some cheap topsoil to form the bulk of the mix if you don't have enough to mix into. There is an approach to raised bed gardening that uses completely new material - like mel's mix - but that will require yearly replacement and inorganic components like vermiculite. I think its kind of silly to be honest, but it obviously works in certain situations.

Trust me on this, Kimmsr gives really good, true advice. I already used pine bark to help my clay soil, sure it really works to make a faster draining soil. The fact is- mulching with compost which feeds the micro life in the soil; makes a loose soil. We may be looking at the bark as a quik fix, when building the soil using compost will creats a long tearm rich, yet loose soil. The more activity of soil organisms will make an easy to grow in soil. I used to install plants and of course we did not have time to build the soil of the location the plants were being planted. The specific landscaper I worked with liked using sand/peat to mix with the soil to loosen it up- a big no no if you ask me as sand just made it heavy and was too fine. I suggested we used mushroom compost that we could get by the truck load for cheap, it worked really great. The landscaper showed me some pruning techniques, and I helped them understand they never have to haul sand ever again!! So, really in the long run- you could add compost/leaves/ect to any native soil type and it will improve over time to the "perfect soil".

I did the same as Jenn everyone that sells mulch near me has wrong sizes as well. I can get the greenall but have to drive 45mins to an hour lol. To me not worth the time. So I now settled on the earthgro. I screened my first batch last night. From a 2cf bag I lost less than half a 5 gal bucket worth to oversize bark. Doesn't seem to bad to me. There was a good amount of sapwood though maybe a qtr of bucket that I had to pick out so far but again worth the effort at $4 per 2cf vs 10$ + 3.85(gas per gal at 11mpg in my guzzler truck)+$5(bridge toll) for one bag of greenall. So that's easy math to me lol. I can get at least 5x as much earthgro bags. The only downside is picking out the sapwood. Even then I'll just watch for nitrogen issues after I get to lazy to pick it all out. lol. I still think it will be better than potting mix. I'm still go one do potting mix as well just for comparison since I have multiples of each type of pepper, so I know for next season. This post was edited by flipback23 on Thu, Mar 6, 14 at 11:03

If this were my bag I would use it straight out of the bag. I would check how much is smaller than 1/8 (or 0.100), because that will raise the PWT and may require screening if you have time to remove sapwood that would help the longevity of the soil in containers, not a problem for the garden bed though. basically I think it's usable. if your goal is to get a decent draining soil you probably can achieve your goal. if you are trying to squeeze every bit of potential out of your plants this might be difficult. also, if you use this and run into problems, you will have problems troubleshooting because your mix is not the standard 5-1-1