Today's Q&A is about filling your raised beds.

For the last several weeks, the students in my Dream to Garden online course have been going

through online live Facebook training with me and they've had Q&A sessions and in one particular

session there were several questions in regard to filling raised beds. And I thought these

questions would be perfect to bring up on the Q&A podcast episode because

many of you probably have the same questions.

I'm going to start out with Rhonda's question.

She asked, if my raised beds are deep, does all of the soil have to be the right soil or

can I put cheap soil at the bottom and good soil on the top?

They're about two feet deep. And I would say, yes, go ahead and put cheap soil on the bottom.

Now, I don't mean contaminated soil or anything like that. Understand when we say cheap soil,

we're talking about whether it's old potting soil that has already had the

nutrients pretty much depleted from old container plantings as long as it

wasn't diseased that's an option or maybe you just want to buy cheap bags or

whatever that's fine and then put the really good stuff toward the top along

those lines I had another question which which was, okay, well,

how deep does the good soil need to be? And in my experience, I would really focus on that top

six inches of soil being your good soil, because most plants will have most of their feeder

roots in that top six inches. Now, there will be plants that will have roots that go much deeper than that.

But if you look at a cross-section diagram of most of your plants, like a picture on the

internet that you see of roots of different vegetables, you'll see that even if they have

a tap root or a deep root, most of the feeder roots are going to be toward the top.

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