How much soil will I need?
 

My master gardener wife has had me building yet another new flower bed where a tree had to be removed. Lots of fun digging through tree roots to put the sprinkler head in there.

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It is 72 inches x 76 inches but there is a slope. It is 17 inches at the low end and just 7 inches at the top. That is filling it with a 2 or 3 inches of the top.

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There is some construction debris and the new sprinkler head in there, but we can ignore that. It will be out of the way on the bottom.

We can go to a local (4 miles away) place that sells great "rich mix" soil by the front end loader scoop. They are pretty good at guessing a lesser load, and I know I don't need a full pickup bed load. A friend will let me use his long bed pickup, and we will have the fun of shoveling it all out into a wheel barrow to dump into the flower bed.

So how much soil (not dirt!) do we need to buy?

I see 1.5 yards. Assuming you’re gonna stamp it down some.

I get 38cu feet so about 1.5 yards. Wheel barrow? Cant you just back up the truck to the bed?

Get the ft^3 or yard and convert to weight.

Obtain a tarp and lay it flat on the bed before they fill it up. You might need to cover the top depending on local laws, so get a long one. Wrap the soil like a burrito.

Makes unloading/moving the soil a pretty simple job

72" x 76" x 12" (avg of 7 & 17) (~65700in^3). If you're saying it's 2-3" below the top of the surround, then subtract that from the 12", although it'll settle a bit.

1 yd^3 = ~46700 in^3. So ~1.5 yds.

A friends truck? Dude, this looks like the perfect job for the Elky!

That will eat up 2 front end loader scoops .

The Elky is not a real pickup. I might get 800 pounds in it without damage. It has nice stainless trim around the windows and the bed edges. Soil trapped under it is a real challenge to clean out.

My friend's truck is a real work truck, and much more capable of taking the load. The calculations I see on line: The average weight of a cubic yard of compost is between 1,080 and 1,350 pounds. If I need 1.5 yards that is way over the 800 pound max for the El Camino.

The bobcat loader scoops around here aren't even a full yard fwiw.

Soooo.... how much will you actually need?

A little bit more than you actually get :D

I like burning tree stumps out. Turn it into a rocket stove and light that candle.

Exactly that much!

We had a guy come over and cut it down, and grind the stump

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It was the tree on the right. An ice storm tore it up, and the cold weather just killed a lot more of it. It is gone, and now it will be a flower bed. It was not totally dead, and would never have burned. Grinding out the major part of the stump helped a lot. The little tree in the front died, and now it has a Oklahoma Redbud in it's place.

The rectangle garden is one of the first we put in long ago.

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This is one we did a few years ago, in the first year of planting.

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All of that used to be grass I mowed.

Glen, you're right that is not a job for the Elky. You might be surprised at delivery prices if the landscape supply isn't 100 miles away.

In typical landscape jargon you need 1.5 yds. which is 3 scoops on a typical tractor loader. Yeah, lightweight soil, 3 (actual) scoops and an 8' bed would be crown full.

One cubic yard (2 scoops) will weigh about 1.5 tons (3000 lbs.). Soils typically weigh a little less, approximately 1000-1200 pounds per scoop. Mulches weigh even less, about 400-500 lbs.



https://www.themulchman.com/faqs.html

There is a very interesting paradox regarding excavations, and backfilling..

If you accurately excavate a 10x10x10 space.. One would think you would need just 1000 CF to fill the hole... But if you get 1000CF of accurately measured fill for backfill .. it would be to much.... You cant compact/consolidate the fill to the same state as the material was in situ..

Trivial things you learn after 40 years in construction management and no help at all

Glen - nice looking place.

Tractor loader buckets are all over the place. There is no ‘normal’.

Where I go they have loaders with 7 or 9 yard buckets… 1 and a bit scoops fills my tandem gravel truck. They also have scales on the loaders so they don’t overload me. Sometimes, I load myself…

My yard tractor has a 22.6 cubic foot (.83 yard) bucket. And it’s the bigger bucket for that tractor.

Beautiful place. Your wife is a great landscape designer.

.... and Glen is fantastic at following her instructions and providing "free" labor ;)!

I get rewarded later! :D

To the OP, was it really that hard to multiply L x W x H and its 27 cu ft to a yard?

And yet landscape supply places tend to use the typical bucket that comes on a back
hoe. I suppose there are minor differences but a yard is a yard and that's the unit used to measure and charge for the material.

Petty post, I know. You are correct in general. Your bucket probably is close to a half a yard when the bucket is spilling out due to an aggressive scoop. It's never a level scoop for me, always over filled to whatever will stay in the bucket.

Call around, find a local bulk soil place (ask your favorite nursery for recs), have 1.5 yd of their planting mix delivered to a tarp spread next to the planter. Cost me $65/yd delivered, and I’m in an expensive city. If they only deliver whole yards or have a two yard minimum, you can always find a use for half a yard of good soil - top up existing planters and pots, spread on lawn, etc.

Phew. If I point to my ear lobes, those are not sore on me. Everything else is. I may have to have someone feed me tomorrow. I can still handle a 12 oz curl so my first beer is in hand.

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My friend's truck has some gotchas to overcome. The key was at his house, and so was the truck's battery. So I got those last night, and put the battery on the charger overnight. I drove over to where he stores it, and put the battery in, after cleaning the terminals and the cables. Oh, and the driver's side door lock does not work, so I have to open from the passenger side, and crawl across to unlock the driver's door. And the inside door handle on the driver's is broken so I have to roll the window down, and play contortionist to reach the outside door button. The rear view mirror glued to the windshield has fallen off.

The starter just clicked, but after 6 or 7 tries, it spun and the truck would not start. Oh yea, one more gotcha. It has two fuel tanks, and only the rear one works! So flip the switch to rear, and it fired up. It is a 5 speed manual, but no issues there. So off to the bulk soil place. I asked the front end loader guy for 1.5 yards. When I went back to the scale it was 1.16 tons. It was a low rider, but I only had to 4 go miles to get home.

The the shoveling commenced. And continued for hours.

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I started on the west side. A plank of 2x12 from before I put in the pit for the scissor lift, 10 years ago, and a concrete block made me a ramp for the wheelbarrow. Dump in the soil, and spread it some. Then move the ramp to the other side. Then to the south side for the ramp.

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About a thousand wheelbarrow loads, (mom told me a million time to never exaggerate!) or it felt like it, TA-DA! The truck is unloaded, and the soil is partly compacted.

We are supposed to get rain tomorrow, so some settling will occur. We will finish it off with bags of top soil that the El Camino can handle.

The pickup is hosed out, the driveway is cleaned off, and I am ready for my second beer and some sitting on my butt.

Mrs. Carrera did assist and she is sore as well. I was alone in the wheelbarrow dumping. Time for my second beer! I will wait until tomorrow to return the truck.

That load was less than I expected. The truck has a real bed! I'd go for 4 beers.

Nice work, Glen...thanks for the photos and narrative!

Your wife is very talented with her gardening.

Working in the garden is very satisfying......:)

Nice! Well done. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you sore the next day (or 3). :D

Looks like a win to me! Congrats!!

Well I was able to feed myself. My shoulders, legs and back ar a bit sore, but not as bad I was fearing. Time to get the pickup back to it's storage place, and the battery and key back to the owner.

And on the seventh day .... Glen drank beer :D

Good job, sir!

This weekend, I'm sanding the upstairs floors. I was a little sore this morning, pretty much everywhere except my arms. I'll be worse tomorrow.

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The master gardener slave driver wanted us to go to Lowe's to buy just 10 - 40 pound bags of soil. Without using a calculator, I figured that was 400 pounds plus moisture.

It rained the other day so some of the bags were rather wet, and the soil came out looking like a dinosaur left a deposit without any odor fortunately. ;)

I knew 400 pounds was a load, so I aired up the air bags in the rear of the El Camino to 20 PSI. The guy loading at Lowe's just dumped and tossed in each bag on the passenger side as it was closest side. I felt a sudden drop on that side and suspect the old air bag blew.

We got home without issue, and unloaded it all.

Today I put the Elky up on my lift, and sure enough, popped air bag right at the top edge at the fold. So remove the shock, lower the suspension and remove the spring, and cut the old airbag out. To get the new one in, remove the rubber cap, step on the bag to partially deflate it, and put the cap back in place. Twists and wrestle the new one into place, and put it back in place and attach shock and done.

The Elky came with Monroe air shock from the factory to load level. They would not last a year without failure. They were warrantied, so it was free replacement just my labor. After the third set, I gave up and installed air bags, but then it requires a change to a much better shock, Bilstiens. So in the trash went the air shocks. I tried to go with just the old shocks, but the rear of the car was like a pogo stick with Monroe shocks. The Bilstiens work great.

So that is done. Next comes digging holes for the new plants she has already purchased.

Question for you Glen.
If that's the street right there next to the sidewalk, why didn't you just back the truck up onto the curb and shovel the dirt directly into the new flower bed instead of using a wheel barrow?

I would have had to back the truck up over the curb. The sprinkler heads and lines would have be destroyed. There are two right in the way, and the lawn is still soft from recent rains. We would have had deep ruts, and the pickup still blocking part of the street, and more sprinkler repair to do. I thought about it, but I did not want to block part of the street.

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From the street side.

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From the top side. Our front yard has about 6 feet of slope top to bottom. Without a ladder or drone I can't shoot a straight down photo of this new garden. It does look better with flowers in it.

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The new flower bed matches nicely with the dry stack one we built several years ago. It has been run into twice from one pizza delivery guy and some random stranger backing up the driveway to turn around.

Looks great, Glen...love the blues and purples! All good varieties for the summer too!

It does look grreat, Glen. But what, no drone shot? Is this another one of those barefoot cobbler's daughter stories or have you just not had time for a flyover?

Glen, that yard is beautiful but we all know that aint your doing.

Go on line and google concrete calculator and it will give you the exact amount to fill that area, but make adjustments for loose garden soil but its pretty accurate.

How much soil will I need?
 

We have a old drone that we bought used to play with. It would work for the garden pics. We don't use a drone in our company at all. My business partner flies our Cessna 182T to shoot aerials. Kinda overkill for a pictures of out flowers. I can climb a ladder faster and easier than setting up that old drone.

A very nice style you have going on there Glen. I've always been a fan of the stone look for houses and landscaping.

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When I put in thee tall sprinkler head it looked like it was too tall. Not anymore, it is swallowed by her growing plants.