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River Gravel for Grow Beds

I am accumulating supplies for my system and worked on a plan for the grow bed media today. I originally thought the media would be the easy part, but I thought wrong.

I checked with three landscaping companies that specialize in gravel, mulch, granite, slate, etc. They might be colluding on their prices because they are all within about $5 bucks of each other. I thought a bulk purchase of river gravel would end up being cheaper than buying gravel a bag at a time, but it appears I was wrong. The bulk suppliers all charge $80-85 / yd with a 2 yd minimum and $25 / $30 delivery fee. That ends up costing more than buying everything in 14 L bags at Home Depot or Lowes and is twice as much gravel as I need.

For me, handling the bags is more convenient anyway because I'll have to tote the gravel from the front driveway about 80 feet to the backyard. There's no way to pull a truck back there.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by TCLynx on March 15, 2011 at 7:54pm

Where are you again? Pebble Junction in Sanford used to have the 1/2" brown river rock for less than $60 a ton (it takes 1.25 ton to make a cubic yard and they used to charge $95 for delivery to my place for up to 6 ton.) Now It's been well over a year since I got a new price list from them and with gas prices going up I'm sure prices have gone up too. Also, if you are looking for the 3/4" stuff I could see that being a little more $.

I would probably tell you to go ahead and get 2 yrds to fill 300 gallons worth of beds and have some left over.

Permalink Reply by B. Pearcy on March 15, 2011 at 8:01pm

I'm in Tampa.

Permalink Reply by TCLynx on March 15, 2011 at 8:12pm

Ah, the other direction from Pebble Junction.

Lava rock is a good media too (as long as it isn't the industrial waste filtration material kind) that I might suggest you put in the bottom half of the grow beds and put a smoother rock for the top half (to make digging and planting easier) if that would make it any cheaper. It will make it lighter but lava rock definitely needs a good rinse before going into your system. I doubt lava rock will actually be a good choice for bagged product. Most of the bagged stuff I remember looking at in the big box stores was like $3-4 dollars or so by the bag and the bags were usually marked as 1/2 a cubic foot That means it would be between 162-216 plus tax and driving for a cubic yard of rock (if the bags actually have that much rock in them I know I got a few bags of lava rock that seemed awful empty.) Granted, I haven't looked at bagged rock for a couple years now so I don't know what the prices are like.

Anyway if you were to get two yards at $85 each and they charge $30 for delivery that would be $200 + tax for the two yards so only $100 a yard delivered and you would only have about a half a yard left over that you could place on the ground around your system and make it look all pretty. Only drawback of bulk stone is that you need to have a place for the dump truck to dump it for you until you can wash it and get it into your grow beds.

I expect you will want about a half a yard to fill each 100 gallon grow bed.

Permalink Reply by B. Pearcy on March 20, 2011 at 6:55pm

I found out today that Home Depot has a bulk size of river gravel besides the 14 liter bags they normally sell for $3.59 each. Their bulk size is equivalent to 30 of those bags, or approximately 420 liters, and it's priced at $86 per bulk sized bag. That works out to $40 less than buying the smaller bags for filling up my two grow beds (if my math is correct). Not everyone owns a vehicle that can haul that kind of weight, but I know someone who has a 1 ton dually which will do the trick. Of course unloading it will require shoveling it out of the truck because it will be much too heavy to lift a bag of that size.