I don't use Mel's mix. I started my garden with a mix of composted horse poop, sandy dirt from my cousin's paddock, vermiculite, and a bagged garden soil called "gardener's gold." I was warned about the possibility of weeds from the horse poop and paddock dirt, but nary a weed has materialized.

The tight spacing helps a lot, but more importantly, keeping the soil loose and light has helped. If you are going to make raised beds, and if you plan to be out in the garden every day, you can pick the weeds as they emerge. As long as you don't have perennial, invasive weeds in your area, like morning glory or something like that, it should be fine.

I don't use it either, but we have few weeds here. If you feel you must, you can always double-dig to turn in more yummies. Manufactured topsoil should be decent for you for a while, but you may want to do a cheap soil test to get an idea of what it is missing.

Dan

My bed is filled with homemade compost (mostly leaves and grass) some municipal compost, some good garden/potting soil from bags, with some sand I had that I just needed to get rid of. I do have a few weeds, which I'm rather sure are from the compost that didn't get hot enough to kill them but they are easy to pull.

My gardens are straight compost. I see some weeds coming up in the new beds that were built and filled last fall, but they will be easy to remove before I plant. The same compost was used in the beds I planted last year and I'm seeing some spinach, carrots and mesclun that survived the winter, but I don't see any weeds at all. I doubt I pulled more than a cup full of weeds from the beds last year.

Granny

Here is a link that might be useful: Annie's Kitchen Garden

I'm not.
{{gwi:871}}
This is a mix of:

Composted pine bark fines
MI peat (reed/sedge peat) not sphagnum
Native soil
Turface
Coarse sand
Dolomite

It has great drainage and water retention, is very alive with soil biota, and extremely productive.

Al

I too juse used a mixture of 80% horse manure to 20% 'other' compost from the county compost facility.

I used this to plant my seedings in and also put some in the house plant pots. I've seen quite a few weeds come up in the past week in all of the containers. Just have to pull them as they come up.

I guess I will be pretty busy pulling weeds out of my raised beds all year.

I have 12" beds with 1/2 being compost and 1/2 being native soil; which is much better than I expected. I don't know about the weeds yet. We'll see this summer.

We have a no-dig organic square foot garden. Layers of:
cardboard, alfalfa, blood & bone, moo poo, hay, & compost. Absolutely no weeds, low maintenance and our vegies are happy. We have squash growing just 3 weeks after planting the seedlings...amazing

Here is a link that might be useful: key biscayne garden

I use a 1 to 1 ratio of 40 lb bags of cow manure and "top soil" I buy for around $1 a bag. The "top soil" has sand...wood chips...organic matter that looks like black soil. The cow manure can have many weed seeds in it.

Organic or not, adding fertilizer just can't be as cost-effective as compost. Put your money in the soil. Go with sheep or chicken manures rather than horse or cow. There will be many fewer weed seeds and these manures provide a higher quality of fertilizer.

I would use Mel's Mix (if only because I wouldn't have to think about all the various options too much), but vermiculite is too hard to find and too expensive. What do people think of using sand? I was thinking about 1/3 peat (I know this is controversial), 1/3 sand, and 1/3 compost. Oh, and can I use cow manure that hasn't been composted (it's free)?

Thanks!