How Safe is the Soil in your Veggie Bed?
- dom@urbanveg.com.au
- Feb 26, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Everyone loves home grown veg. You know exactly what went into them. But how much do you know about the "Premium Potting Mix" you sourced from your local landscaper?
Soil safety isn’t a small thing when you’re growing food for your family — or, in our case, for schoolchildren and aged-care residents. Cheap bulk “garden mixes” and recycled landscape soils can carry heavy metals, herbicide residues and contaminants from their source material, and once they’re in your bed they’re in your vegetables.
That’s why we never fill our beds with unknown bulk mix. Instead, every UrbanVeg bed is filled with a custom organic blend made from known, traceable ingredients — chosen so we know exactly what your vegetables are growing in.
Combined with food-safe, iron-oxide-treated timber rather than the arsenic-laden CCA pine most landscapers use, it means the whole growing system, from the boards to the soil, is built around the food being safe to eat.
For schools and aged-care facilities this is more than reassurance — it’s part of meeting a duty of care. Being able to point to food-safe timber and a traceable growing medium makes the difference when a garden is feeding vulnerable people. If soil safety matters to you, it’s worth asking any supplier exactly what’s in their mix; we’re always happy to tell you exactly what’s in ours.
Here's three reasons why we only used a custom premium mix in our garden beds:
1. Contamination
Late last year, a batch of commercial compost left a recycling facility in Melbourne, bound for garden centres in central Victoria and Melbourne.
Over the next few weeks, it was combined into soil mixes, and sold to backyard gardeners planting their summer veggie crops. Shortly afterwards, many of those crops were dying.
Experts believed it contained a powerful herbicide which had not broken down in the composting process.
We only ever fill our beds with a careful mix of premium bagged products that has been tried and tested for great results. Read more about our mix here
2. Nutrition
You get out what you put in. Our vegetable beds are renowned for their prolific results. We are very careful what we put into them and use a tried and tested potting blend sourced only from premium bagged products.
Very often "premium potting mixes" sold by landscapers are extremely cheap mixes with a sprinkling of fertiliser. They are often lacking the varied mix of nutrition plants need, or have and extremely short effective lifespan
We use no sand, silt, mud or clay, but a careful selection of volcanic rock, coir and bio-char together with organic composts, organic fertilisers and other potting mediums.
This base mix sets you up for years of solid vegetable growth. And to save adding fertiliser later, we install a discrete in-ground composter. This allows you to dispose of kitchen scraps straight into your bed. Our starter worms thrive - moving in and out, fertilising your veggies for free!
And because we know what went into them, you can be confident the vegetables you grow are nutritious, and free of any unwanted nasties!
Read more about our special vegetable mix here
3. Self-Watering
Urban Veggie Crew install high yield raised garden beds called "Wicking beds" in the Sydney climate, that are lined and store their water in the base which soaks up through the potting mix to the root zone.
These produce massive amounts of veg in a small space with hardly any effort. And because they water from below there are no weeds, less pests, less disease and no nutrients are lost. More info on that here...
For wicking to work well, we are careful with the mix we choose at the start. We carefully layer the fill in our beds in different ratios.
We ensure additional charcoal and volcanic material in the lower layers keeps the water in the base fresh and starts off the wicking process well.
The additional organic material we add to the root zone keeps gives the plants exactly what they need.
And the thick mulch layer on top keeps the surface dry, which pests and weeds hate! (more on that here...)
Find out More
Click here to find out how the raised garden beds we install supercharge your veg with everything they need to thrive, with very low maintenance. Feel free to get in touch for a chat if you prefer.
Our beds are all:
And even better they:
