Spring is here and it’s time to start getting your CedarCraft planters ready! You have them assembled and it was a snap. But now it comes down to the dirty work – filling them with soil. You may be wondering, how much soil do I need to fill this?
You may have read our previous blog post on Soil 101 for container gardening. That post gave you some insights on why your container soil is so important for your garden planters and that you shouldn’t dig up dirt from your yard to fill your raised bed.
This weekend our CedarCraft team assembled our planter collection and filled them all with a container gardening mix. We’re going to give you some step-by-step instructions on what you need to do to fill your planters.
First you need to break out the calculator and figure out how much soil your planter needs. You can find a plethora of gardening calculators from a simple Google search. Here’s a handy calculator on Home Depot’s website.
To determine how much soil you need to fill your planter or raised bed, these are the dimensions you need for your formula:
Length (in inches) x Width (in inches) x Depth (in inches) = total amount of cubic feet or cubic yards of soil. (12 cubic feet of soil = 0.444 cubic yards of soil)
We’ve made it even easier for you! If you take a look at our collection descriptions, we have cubic feet of soil capacity for each planter listed:
CedarCraft Cascading Planter: 5 cubic feet = 0.1 cubic yards = 77 quarts
CedarCraft Elevated Planter: 4 cubic feet = 0.1 cubic yards = 102 quarts
PatioCraft Elevated Planter: 6 cubic feet = 0.2 cubic yards = 179 quarts
CedarCraft Urban Planter: 5 cubic feet = 0.1 cubic yards = 128 quarts
CedarCraft Raised Garden Planter: 11.5 cubic feet = 0.4 cubic yards = 295 quarts
PatioCraft Raised Garden Planter: 16 cubic feet = 0.6 cubic yards = 478 quarts
Now that you know how much soil you need, you need to know what kind of soil to fill it with.
Since our team filled each planter in our whole collection, we visted our local commercial soil source recommended by landscapers and contractors. We needed a lot of soil and it filled our truck bed! If you have one or two planters, you won’t need to go to these lengths.
We used a soil mix with 60% topsoil and 40% compost, and then added an additional 10% vermiculite to that. With shovels in hand, we poured the vermiculite into the truck bed on top of the soil and got to work mixing!
With smaller projects, you can pour your soil mixes onto a tarp and rotate. You can also create your own Mel’s Mix we mentioned in our Soil 101 post with this recipe:
Before you add soil to your planters, make sure you have your liners in place. You will need landscaping fabric for your Elevated and Raised Garden planters.
Now you know what kind of soil mix to use and how much, all that’s left is adding it to your planters. Happy gardening!
