Western Organics Incorporated
5441 E Cheyenne Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89156
(702) 639-0370

Greg
Southern Nevada

And BTW...Nothing's cheap these days.

im planning to build a raised vegetable bed for spring and filling it with the store bought (home depot, lowe's) compost and garden soil would be quite expensive, Im hoping that I can find a place that sells garden soil in the cubic yard here in vegas.

I just gave you a place (above):)

Greg
Southern Nevada

Spending your money on something called "garden soil" or "top soil" is simply a large waste since what you get is mostly what you already have, the mineral component of soil. What your garden needs is organic matter so what you need to look for is leaf mold or compost, or maybe both, and not anything the seller lables as soil.

The least expensive method of obtaining material for your raised bed is to make compost. Check out the other postings in this forum for various methods...lasagne, etc...if you have access to leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds, etc., you can make as much compost as you need! And, if you make the compost where you'll have your bed, you'll have fewer weeds in your bed next year!

amorymichelle, I did the same last fall. My husband built 2 simple wooden frames. I purchased cheap soil by the yard and built up the level about 3 or 4" above the surrounding lawn. To improve the crappy soil I topped with a foot or more of organic matter- leaves, grass clippings, various yard waste from fall cleanup, summer flower pots with used potting mix, coffee grounds, whatever I found. I mounded it up way above the frame, a foot or more, and covered with cotton sheets for winter. This picture was in January and the OM had shrunk down to mere inches. By summer the OM was reduced to only a couple of inches and the soil underneath was soft and loamy.
{{gwi:287783}}

Despite what KImm always says, to end up with raised beds you do have to add actual soil. The additional OM on top will improve that soil but shrink down to nothing.

Those beds that we built one year ago are now only raised to the same level as where we built up with soil. That 12-18" of OM has been consumed and, essentially, disappeared. It improved the soil greatly but did NOT raise the level of the soil.

Karen

Last fall, I piled up 6 feet of leaves, with a few grass clippings and a little finished compost to inoculate the piles. They composted down to about 18 inches during the 4 to 5 months over the Winter. During the 3 months from April to start of July, the composted leaves fell from 18 inches to only 12, when I added another 6 inches of composted grass clippings and shredded newspaper.

During the past 3 months, it has fallen again from 18 inches to 12 inches, and I've added wood whips on top to bring it back up.

My raised beds are 8 foot circles that are 18 inches high. The soil beneath was hard clay and Bermuda grass turf. My tomatoes plants have sent roots down through the compost and dug well into the clay beneath, which has loosened up a great deal with all the leaves on top for 6 months. When I planted in April, I added 75 pounds of clay kitty litter to the top of each bed and scratched into the surface with a rake. It has really helped the beds hold water better this year than they did last year.

You can grow great plants with only compost in the raised beds, but you will need to keep adding compost because it decays rapidly during the heat of summer. In my picture above, my tomatoes vines are more than 12 feet tall, and the basil is over 2 feet tall. In addition to using the basil for salads and pasta all summer, twice this summer I've cut the basil down from 3 feet to 1 foot to make lots of pesto that I freeze for winter in plastic bags. It grows like a weed.

thank you very much for your reply guys, it's my first time to plant vegetables here in vegas, we just move here from hawaii 2 months ago, i have been successful growing tomatoes in hawaii Im hoping it's goin to be thesame here in vegas. I'm going to build two, 2' by 14' raised bed, both of them are goin to be at least 14" above ground level.

Hawaii to Las Vegas?
Man, I can't imagine what sort of unspeakable things you must have done to rack up that much bad karma.

Just kidding!
(sorta)

Many peoples expectation when they buy soil is that it will be something akin to Loam, a specific soil most often described as having 45 percent sand, 25 percent silt, 25 percent clay and 5 percent organic matter, and seldom will anything sold as "topsoil" or "garden soil" be that. There is no definition of what those soils should be so they can be what ever the seller wants that soil to be.
If, when purchasing some kind of soil, you look at what you will be getting and understand it most likely will not be much of anything and that you will need to amend it to make it into a useable soil, ie know what you are getting, then do so if necessary. Just do not expect to get really good soil.