Topsoil is like black gold for your garden, creating a stable base for hard landscaping, giving a newly laid lawn the best start, encouraging the growth of beautiful blooms and boosting the productivity of your fruit and veg patch. But not every garden has the ideal soil composition that allows for good drainage while capturing essential nutrients and micro-organisms. Over time, topsoil can become eroded or depleted, and if you live in a new build, the topsoil may have been stripped completely during the build process. You need to replace the topsoil to work with your existing subsoil, but just how much do you need? Recommended depths for topsoil • General gardening: for most planting, such as for a herbaceous border, you'll need around 8 inches (200mm) of topsoil. • Lawns: four to six inches (100mm-150mm) of topsoil is required to let the roots of a newly laid lawn establish themselves. • Vegetables: the depth of topsoil you need depends on the type of vegetables you're growing. Surface crops like tomatoes, courgettes and beans will be happy with six to eight inches (150mm-200mm) of topsoil, whereas root vegetables like parsnips, carrots and potatoes will require twelve to sixteen inches (300mm-400mm) of topsoil to do well. Calculating your topsoil order At London Lawn Turf Company, we make it easy for you to choose the right topsoil for your growing needs. But you still need to work out how much you'll need to order. Grab a pen and notepad and a measuring tape, then start by measuring the length and width of your lawn, flowerbed or veg patch. It doesn't matter whether you measure up in metres or feet as our handy online calculator will do the conversion for you. Depending on the type of soil you've selected, you'll now be able to calculate how many bags you need. Let's say your vegetable plot is 10m x 10m and you want to grow a nice crop of new potatoes for Christmas. You'll need 400mm of topsoil for the best results, which means you'll need 40 cubic metres of topsoil. Because each tonne bag of fruit and veg topsoil covers 1 cubic metre you'll need 40 bags. Buy topsoil in bulk The more topsoil you order from us, the cheaper the price, so why not get together with a neighbour or your fellow allotment holders and buy in bulk? When you've calculated how much topsoil you need, you'll benefit from our low bulk-buy prices, so call us on 01959 897603 to start saving now.