Beautiful topsoil, handcrafted from the best raw materials around.
Our Premium Blended Topsoil is an excellent choice for all of your topsoil needs including vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs, lawns and even the occasional mud pie.
We manufacture our own bulk soil. It is kept dry in our hoop house and available all year.
We start with soil that is already rich in organic matter and has not been used for farming, thereby avoiding chemicals and nutrient depletion. We add compost, organic matter and voilà! we have the wonderful soil people love!
Our bulk soil is available by the yard for pickup or delivery. It is also sold in half cubic foot bags.
Beautiful topsoil, handcrafted from the best raw materials around.
How We Make Our Soil
The raw material we insist on using at The Rock Pile is really only accessed by the clearing of wooded areas for commercial or residential development. That soil has had many years of decaying leaves, twigs, insects, droppings of animals, etc., all composted together, thus returning minerals back into the soil. The longer the soil has been woods, the better it is, at least in this part of the country.
The soil itself is a clay based soil blended with much more decomposing matter. In addition to naturally occurring compost, we add more compost to the soil.
A great advantage of a clay based soil is that it retains much more moisture than a very sandy soil and thus usually requires substantially less watering by sprinkling. Droughts and heavy periods of rain really mess with the ideal plan, but, in general, a clay based topsoil that is properly aerated every 2-3 years will permit lawns, trees and shrubs to have a deeper, stronger root system than almost any other type of soil.
The reason we use the type of soil processing equipment we do is based around the bacteria cultures that form in aerobically “positive” soils. These cultures function only in soil conditions that have sufficient oxygen and size to keep the colony alive and processing other smaller bacteria in the normal food chain that exists in other life forms throughout the world. Those colonies are the “life’s blood” of the plants and trees that make up our forests, grasslands, and landscaping.
The topsoil producing equipment we use keeps the basic structure of the soil intact and, while it still breaks down the soil into a smaller, more granular consistency, it does not “shatter the soil” into dust or powder nearly as much as the shredder type mechanisms that most producers use. Our soil is “screened” by passing it across an open ended, 6 foot diameter wire mesh screen that turns and sifts the soil, separating the smaller material from the larger chunks of debris and stone, leaving a fine, workable, “live” topsoil for our customers. The cultures can reform the bacterial colonies required to nurture plants, trees and lawns quickly with the addition of just basic water.
Most other types of machines use a set of flails, spinning at high speed, to shatter all the material that passes by into small particles that are then conveyed to the “top soil” pile and sold, complete with the shattered rock, wood, and debris that all went through the shredder. The problem is that the somewhat delicate cultures of bacteria are also shattered and must begin to rebuild their colonies again from zero. This problem is magnified when a heavy, non-aerobic clay is used as the base product. There is nothing for them to gain nourishment from and then, the few positive bacteria that did survive have nothing to live on and die off, causing the soil to go “dead” or “anaerobic.”
At The Rock Pile, we chose to have a high quality product that gives consistent results at a reasonable price for all of our customers, rather than a low quality product at a cheap price that just doesn’t work out well, or as expected, most of the time.
Other Notes on Topsoil
Like many other good things in life, good topsoil is hard to find. Many bulk topsoil suppliers get their soil from land previously used for farming. Chemical residue from fertilizers and pesticides create an unhealthy soil for establishing just about any type of new plant growth.
We start with high quality topsoil, accepting only soil from forested areas that are being developed to ensure that the raw soil is rich in nutrients and organic matter, free from pesticides and fertilizers. We then blend in additional compost material and process the blended soil in a large screen. The screen will filter out the large debris (over 1/2”).
Our Premium Blended Topsoil is an excellent choice for all of your topsoil needs including vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs, lawns and even the occasional mud pie.
A word about the challenges of the topsoil process and quality…
As more of the local forested areas are developed, the raw topsoil is becoming more of a scarce commodity. We choose to accept soil only from areas that have been forested. Some of the places our raw soil comes from have been unused for hundreds of years. While we process our soil in a way that places a high importance on consistency and quality, we screen roughly 200-300 cubic yards per day, and some inconsistencies can occur.
Occasionally, small pieces of debris not caught by our screen do end up in the finished product. Debris will definitely include small pebbles, twigs and other natural matter. Debris will sometimes include: small pieces of refuse including glass. Unfortunately, it is impossible for us to prevent this from ever happening. As the land is cleared by bulldozers, whatever debris that was in the path of the bulldozer will be pushed along and eventually loaded into large dump trucks. Once on our site, the soil is then again moved by a large bulldozer, dragged, stacked, mixed, screened and then dumped again. If a bottle had been on the original excavation site, it would have either been broken long ago, or broken by the first bulldozer pass. The topsoil is screened and blended with compost, but the screening process will only catch debris larger than ½”, so smaller pieces will sometimes end up in the finished product. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any concerns you may have.
