How much soil, What mix.

At least 5 years, and you've already dug out a flower bed - well done. Unless your house was built on a rubbish tip - the junk can not go down too far - and one of those little tractory excavators could get rid of the worst of it shaking the soil out - leaving just smaller chunks to be picked out at your leisure. A load of top soil dug in, and you could have a reasonable garden to play with in time for the main growing season. Lawn, flower beds and vegetable plot - whatever.

Is there any chance you can upload pictures to show what your dealing with?

If you can get it into reasonable nick, it would be much better than hiding it all under raised beds - and being limited in designing your garden by them.

 

Hi Mark, looks like we had the same builders !

I know its a hard slog, but digging the rubble out is in my opinion, your best way forward.

In my other post you started ( how to make a raised bed) you can see I persevered with the digging and got a great result. In the plot i pictured i pulled out 7 unbroken breezeblocks ( a new stand for my water butt !!!) together with countless bits of rubble / hardcore. It was very tough work, but now I am happy to have got 2 spades depth of workable soil.

I am topping my raised beds with peat free compost from gc, and also soil from around the raised beds ( this will be replaced by weed supression membrane and bark chips to form an outer path for access) and think this will be sufficient planting depth when all worked in together.

�£30 or �£40 quid is a lot of money, that could be spent elsewhere. If the ground is not dug through you could end up with a high water table as there will be poor drainage, which wont help at all.

Why dont you concentrate your efforts on one raised bed at a time ?

I wish you luck, I'm just glad i got an earlier start than you seem to have had.

TTFN