I'm not recommending this, but I've added up to an inch of sand in one day in 1/4" incriments in low spots. I add sand 1/4" at a time then use the leaf rake to pull the grass leaf blades up. The turf has recovered fine for me, but that is no guarantee for others. The proceedure in the prior post above is the safer route. You can mix topsoil and sand. For straight topsoil, I've bought bags from the big box store and emptied them into a cart where I ho and rake it daily until dry and loose. Note: I have never added more than 1/4" of straight topsoil at one time, so I can't say if it will work at 1" at a time depths without hurting the grass.

Do what you can do without rotting their trunks with soil piled against them or killing the trees by cutting off their atmospheric moisture by filling beneath them. This probably boils down to a bare minimum layer of sandy or otherwise extra porous soil that will give you enough rootless ground to get underplantings started, until the trees root up into. Be sure to water enough to keep the orginal soil beneath the fill moist.

Kris.....my only comment on Bud's comment about having raised the bed around her peonies and having them bloom....well....I heard once that a flyer bailled out of a plane at 10,000 feet.....without a parachute..... and survived. There is no accounting for just plain dumb luck. The peony is a plant unto itself....it has this brain that tells it...."I'm planted too deep and I will not bloom"..... You put a peony at a particular depth....and it blooms. Then you topdress it....you bring soil around its base, effectively putting the plant deeper. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the plant resents what you've done and refuses to bloom...or blooms not as expected. So, once you have found your depth, leave it there. If you feel your plant is not blooming as you would like, and think its in the ground too deep....simply lift it. Dig around the plant's four sides, as deep as you can so that the entire plant is free of the soil holding it. Then choose the side you wish to lift and put a spade or shovel under...and lift. Backfill as you go. Lift it a half-inch...an inch...but try to not take it out of the ground. Just backfill and firm up....then water generously. Sometimes this will not in any way harm the position of the roots and may not cost any non-blooming time.

Thank you, all, for your responses, I greatly appreciate them. Let me see if I can hit on each of your questions. The box is 69" long x 24" wide, and 18.5" deep (these are the inside dimensions). The whitish stuff around the base is the native soil, a hard clay. We dug up the grass in the area where we planned to put the bed, tilled the clay somewhat, and set the bed down on that spot. We did not put down any barriers between the bed and the clay. I plan on growing vegetables - mostly tomatoes and peppers, hence the depth of the bed. I'm honestly not entirely sure if I'll start vegetables now, given that it's already the end of August - I'm thinking that, maybe for now through autumn I'll just do some late-season annual flowers, just to have something there, and then start my veggies next spring. Since the native clay is pretty useless for growing what I want to grow, we bought soil to fill the bed. My husband (God love him) hates to spend much money on anything, and most of the soils available at the store were between $4 and $11 per bag. My husband was not keen on this. So I did some online research. I read somewhere that you can mix topsoil with compost 1:1 to make a good gardening soil. Both the topsoil and compost were selling for around $2 per bag. I hate cheaping out on stuff as important as soil type, but it was the only way to get my husband on board, so I'm really hoping this mix works. I forget how many bags of each we bought (the receipt is lying around somewhere), but when we mixed in the last few bags into the bed, I noticed that the soil level was considerably low (as shown in the picture). I commented that we needed more soil. My husband argued that he wasn't shelling out any more money on dirt. On another trip to Home Depot for something else, I finally managed to convince him to get more soil. So the soil level is higher now - not quite the 2" from the top that I've read is ideal, but better than it was before. The fence is going to provide some shade in the morning, yes, but once the sunlight clears the fence, the bed will have many hours of full sun. I didn't want to put the bed in the middle of the yard because I want to keep as much open space as possible for the dogs to run around. As an aside, the other reason the bed is as high as it is is because my male dog loves to pee on everything, and I didn't want him peeing on my plants; so, I made the bed high enough so he can't reach them. *chaparralgirl*