Its not Craigslist that is shady, just some of the sellers that use it.

You can make good healthy soil without purchasing any soil, or dirt, from anywhere or anybody. Simply add and maintain adequate amounts of organic matter in the soil you have. Organic material would be compost, animal manures, food scraps, shredded leaves, any and all vegetative waste. Organic matter is the residual, what is left in the soil, after the Soil Food Web has worked on and digested what is readily digestible.

However, you can also create a good healthy soil by buying some from somewhere, even Craigslist, by ensuring that soil has adequate amounts of organic material in it.

The idea that you have to buy soil from someplace to get good healthy soil is probably not one of the brightest ideas that has come up.

kimmq is kimmsr

Right, I would evaluate each offering on its merits by looking at it. And talking with the seller/donor.

I've met plenty of nice people both buying and selling on CL.

The OP said they would be utilizing soil being "given" away on Craigslist, not buying soil. If I didn't want a massive quantity of soil, and I had the capability to haul what I needed, and I just wanted mineral soil that may be nutrient depleted but was otherwise garden-ready, this would be an awesome free way to get some.

<can I create a good top soil from dirt in people's front yards> I wonder why people are having excess soil to give away?

Construction projects.

I would think a contractor will clean up after any project.

But I was asking ahappy camper

Certainly there were times when I wish I had a truck so I can get all that free soil and mulch being advertised. The mulch is usually the extra that wasn't used for some recent garden project. The soil sometimes is newly delivered, and sometimes is dug up from the yard for some other project.

My main concern, which may also concern you, si that the soil from someone's backyard might be full of snail eggs that you don't want. Almost any other insect or pest introduced to the back yard by random soil might move away if there isn't any good food source, but I'm really worried about bringing snails into my garden. I only have decollate snails and pillbugs right now that are the visible, plant eating pests that stay year-round. Everything else, such as caterpillars, have their time and place, so I don't worry much about them. So I would hate to know that I have introduced garden snails to my yard from someone else's soil.

That would be my main concern with getting a large amount of soil from someone else's yard. However, if you have time to neutralize that soil and any unwanted bugs or eggs in it, I think it would be OK.

I don't know much about snails but surely they can also migrate to your yard on their own. Real slow of course, but they must be able to move around in other ways than being transported. I wouldn't worry too much about it myself but again I don't know anything about snails, are they a horrible pestilence?

Unfortunately, you can bring home many things such as invasive weeds or even red worms. Slugs would be the least of my worries but I'm sure they will also come along.

Esp., from free mulch from landscapers or utility companies that grind up everything and may not even realize it.

I was pleased to hear that my elec. co-op tree crew only shreds trees and limbs that are healthy - no dead or diseased stuff goes into the mulch. Our city yard waste mulch sites, though...everything goes in.

thank you for the responses everyone

gumby, a lot of people are tearing out their lawns or just replacing it with fake grass. im not really sure tbh but most of the ones giving away free "dirt" scrape it from their own front yards in their home

FWIW, I have been using soil from CL and other sources for the last couple of years to replace/fix my topsoil. In short, the soil here is very bad, very deficient in OM, and very high in pH. Due to the cold winter temps and lack of precipitation, stuff doesn't tend to decompose as much as mummify, so our topsoil layer is thin to non-existent in places and then you get to hardpan. On top of this, when the builder went to replace the topsoil after the houses had been built, they brought in loads of stuff from somewhere with boron levels off the charts, to the point that even the trees were struggling, let alone annuals and lawns. So it's been a process of replacing the lawn with native plants, moving all the boron soil to areas where I don't really want to grow much, and then building raised beds for veggies. And the free soil has come in handy, along with my own compost and the free mulch the county hands out every spring made from Christmas trees. You have to do some due diligence, but it's worth it.

Wow, I'm curious how you figured out you had excessive boron. Sounds like there was some real Sherlock Holmes work.

Wasn't too hard. I moved in, and after the second year in a row of the trees looking awful and none of the plants I added thriving, I took some photos and leaves to the master gardeners at my local university extension. They suggested having my soil tested and told me to ask for a boron level once I told them where I was located. Turns out the same builder responsible for my entry level neighborhood had cut similar corners on some ritzy lots about an hour south of me and were in the middle of a nasty court case. Back in the days of the housing boom, before the bust and economic slump, houses were going up so fast that a lot of shady cost-cutting went under the radar.

So was he using soil that was naturally high in boron for topsoil, or how did the boron get there?

My guess, because the builder is no longer in business, is that when they built this housing development they scraped off whatever topsoil existed when they were leveling the area (it's on a long, foothill slope with lots of twists and turns and there are a lot of rocks not too far down) and either didn't bother saving it like they are supposed to, or didn't try too hard and it washed away, or they just didn't have enough to go around after the foundations were poured. There are areas around in the region that have naturally occurring boron-affected soils, which is one reason for that rule about conserving topsoil and reusing it onsite, and the builder, either knowingly or unknowingly, decided to use imported dirt to fill the lots up to landscaping grade. Luckily for me, my lot is only partly affected in that they only landscaped the front yard, which they did cookie-cutter with lawn and trees. So the back yard only has the regular issues with desert soils. The most labor intensive part of the front yard was ripping the dead lawn up, removing as much of the fill as I could, replacing it with dirt and OM amendments, and then planting select drought-adapted mostly native stuff. The crappy dirt I moved to the steep sloping sides of the lot where I made a couple of berms and covered them with 3 inches of river rock mulch. The sickest tree died, the other survived having its rootball exposed and new dirt tucked in and has come back nicely.

Thanks for the explanation. Sorry to hear all that. Sounds like you are on your way though. I'm sure it's more challenging in the desert (spent a lot of time in NM myself, it's a whole different ballgame from the Midwest!).