If you have the room and the will and drive to actually do it , it is not difficult to make and build up much better soil than the supposed topsoil that you can buy by the bag at Wal-Mart or other stores. What constitutes topsoil is kind of a vague thing too. I have been in the construction business all my life and I have seen some really good topsoil and then I have seen some stuff passed off as topsoil that was pretty bad. I know if I actually paid for a truckload of topsoil and that brought me a load of some of the stuff I have seen, I would make them come and get it and reload it with a scoop shovel or at least refund my money and move it out of the way someplace.

Good soil or dirt needs to be lose and fluffy and have a lot of nutrients and vegetation in it. By vegetation I don't mean weeds and grass, I mean compost and decayed vegetation. When we moved out to our mini ranch west of Gillette that was one of the big things I wanted was a big productive garden and a nice lawn and yard. Well it was forty acres of virgin sod and was hard and dry. I bought a brand new Troy-Bilt tiller and was going to get my yard and garden ready. well it did not take me long to find out that I was in for quite a job with that little Troy-Bilt. I had a very good friend in the Masons and at church that had a big ranch and manure from about ten thousand head of cattle that he wanted to get rid of so he furnished the tractor loader to load it and I hauled over fifty pickup loads of this old stacked up manure out and put on the area that was to be my yard and garden. Between the two it was about two and a half acres. Then I went to town and rented a thirty horsepower John Deere tractor with a rear tiller and tilled that whole area about sixteen inches deep and several different ways. Wow what a difference that made. I had the best garden that year that I have ever had and after breaking it up really good with thee tractor, my little Troy-Bilt did great the next years. I had carrots and new potatoes like you wouldn't believe.

After getting the lawn established I had all kinds of grass clipping to make compost with so I bought a compos tumbler. Best investment I ever made in fact I liked it so much I bought a second one and people from town would bring there clippings out and I had a batch of compost going most of the time. Between the compost and plenty of good rotted manure I had a great garden every year, Had to buy another freezer to store all the vegetables in. One afternoon my wife and I picked enough sweet corn to put up forty gallon freezer bags of fresh corn. It was really fun and we had all the fresh vegetables we could use plus enough to give to friends in town. There was one old couple that were in my church that had enough money to buy anything and everything they wanted but you would think I brought them a bag of thousand dollar bills if I took the some fresh vegetables. Appreciative people make it all worth it.

I took some work and time but I guarantee that the soil in that garden was better than anything you could buy in a bag.

Learn more about this author, Bill Whitney.
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