Raised Bed

This past summer we did a lot of work in our backyard. We built a patio, constructed a grape arbor, made a composer for vegetable matter and most exciting of all, built a raised bed. It's around 4 feet wide, 8 feet long, 1 foot high and made of large boards of wood. For its dirt we ordered 1 cubic yard of soil and when that was not enough an additional half cubic yard, arriving shortly after ordering it in a truck. Upon inspecting it we found its quality to be a little disappointing. It was heavy, darkly colored and bordering on septic. To improve the soil we spread it out thinly over a tarp to give it a chance to absorb some much needed oxygen and dry it out a little. This helped a bit but as a step to further improve it we mixed in a good amount of dried, milled sphagnum moss. This seemed to improve its overall quality and satisfied we went ahead and put it in the bed. Upon doing so we found that we had a bit extra so we spread the bonus soil over our flower garden. I am unsure of how soil is going to turn out next year, but will be sure update this with the results come spring.