What Five Yards of Good Dirt Looks Like

See that?  Five yards of compost and sand and other good stuff.  (I believe the butter knife we found in there falls outside of the realm of “Other Good Stuff” though.  They SAID it was screened….)  We brought in five yards of “vegetable garden mix” dirt to fill in our yard and garden boxes- it wasn’t quite enough, and we’ll get another five yards to hopefully finish this part of the task.  BUT, 2 guys with shovels and 2 guys with wheelbarrows decimated that pile in 1 hour flat.  (Thanks for coming to help Wonder Daddy, Dad and Beastly Brothers!)  That’s less time than it took my husband to hose off the driveway and all the tools!  Pretty cool, if you ask me!

I don’t know how this price compares to other local companies, but it seemed more than fair: 5 yards delivered, for $200.  Not bad at all.  It’s actually from the local company that composts the county’s yard waste (and we can put our food scraps in the yard waste bin.)  We certainly could have gone with a cheaper dirt mix, but I intend to grow food in the majority of our yard, either as a de-facto garden spot or as sneaky ornamentals, and how much easier is it to simply get the best dirt possible?  Much easier.  Definitely worth the price.

*One beef with this dirt: I don’t know what they were composting, but it smells like steer manure, and swarms of flies settled over the yard which presumably were inside the dirt pile to begin with.  They’re not big flies, more like midges or fruit flies.  That smell, and the flies, had better be gone in a day or two!*

Sometimes I feel ridiculous for sending away most of my compostable food, when the tumbling composter is full and the worms can’t eat as much as I produce in the kitchen.  But you know….this company does an awful good job of composting, and perhaps $200 is a good price to pay for not needing to devote a huge chunk of my yard to a high-maintenance compost pile?  That’s not to say I don’t compost, because I currently have a worm bin, a tumbling composter, and 2 separate piles of weeds and straw, plus a sod pile, all cooking away.  But…there’s an awful lot of stinky food, prickly blackberries, full-of-seeds weeds, and woody branches I just send away instead of trying to take care of them myself.