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Compost top dressing

Can any one help me with an idea of calculating how to work how compost I need for top dressing lawns, preferably litres per square metre,  I have all sorts of calculations for soils, gravels etc but this.

Thanks 

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  • PRO

    Thats basically meaningless.  One is a volume(litres) the other is an Area( Meters x Meters)  

    Without knowing the density and mass of the "compost" it is not possible to answer your question.  The density will depend on loads of things like water content - so each new material could be totally different to the last.

    Best thing to do is use Length x Breadth x Depth to give a total volume of material needed for a small lawn then see how many bags of "compost" you actually use.  You will then be able to calculate number of bags for say 100 Sq Meters lawn and use that to put your next estimate within a couple of bags - its fairly cheap anyway and will keep for the next job.

     

  • PRO

    Hi Oliver, there are so many answers to this one, its almost piece of string territory. Different materials weigh different amounts - eg 70/30 might be 1000kg for a bulk bag, wet compost  / soil mix 800kg, fluffy dried screened compost 500kg.

    So having said that, we use a rule of thumb that a light dressing is around 4-5mm and a heavy is 10mm max. So roughly speaking, 70/30 sand/soil topdressing is 4kg per sqm, compost/soil 3kg/sqm and dry compost 2kg per sqm.

    So assess what type of compost material your using, is it dried, screened, fluffy etc, weigh a bag, and then work out the coverage. If it's not dried, I would use 3kg/sqm, dried 2kg per sqm

    Doing it on the above, we get around 250sqm from a bulk bag of all 3 types for a light dressing, and 125sqm for a heavy dressing.

    Hope that helps.

  • Hi guys, thats why I was thinking litres as opposed to weight,  I guess a 1000 L wet or dry would still cover X area.

    Andrew you area of 250sqM was kind of what I was thinking but wasn't sure. Thanks both.

  • PRO

    1000 litres is a cubic metre.

    So spread out to a thickness of 10 mm it will cover 100 square metres.

    20 mm thick it will cover 50 square metres and so on. You need to take in to consideration compaction, how tightly it has been packed and how it will bulk up.

    If you dig a hole and fill it back in you need to whack it down to get it back in, if you are carting the soil away you need a skip bigger than the hole, but you really know all this.

     Andy 

     

     

  • PRO

    We used to buy loose sand, gravel and aggregates by the cubic yard as the merchant did not have a weigh bridge, but they did have a front end loader with a calibrated bucket that had been checked by Weights and Measures.

    If the sand was wet it weighed a hell of a lot more than it did when it was dry for the same volume.

     Andy 

  • PRO

    To go a stage further a cubic metre of water is a 1000 litres and near enough weighs a 1000 kilograms, which is one tonne.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre

    Litre
    The litre (British and Commonwealth spelling) or liter (American spelling) (SI symbols L and l, other symbol used: ℓ) is a metric unit of volume. It…
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