If you're just starting to plant your garden because the final frost is imminent (goodbye until November!), you'll probably need some soil at some point. But just how much are you willing to pay, and more importantly, how much is it actually worth?

The writer for Sustainable Scoop recently started to grow a garden and is living proof that is pays - quite literally - to shop around if your buying soil. After all, it's dirt we're talking about here, not water from the Fountain of Youth.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve started our own little garden in our backyard. We live in wine country, so it was relatively easy to find some once-used wine barrels that are discarded by wineries every year. These wine barrels, cut in half and filled with plants of all kinds, are a common sight in our neighborhood. We decided to use these containers for our backyard garden.

Of course, opting to use containers for a garden meant finding good soil to fill them with. After calling several nurseries and landscaping supply yards, we realized that soil isn’t cheap. Not even close. One nursery was selling its standard-sized bags of potting soil for twelve dollars. Really, guys? Twelve bucks for a bag of dirt? That soil had better grow chocolate and rainbows if I’m going to drop that kind of dough.

So we headed over to Whole Foods, where, thankfully, they had bags of potting soil and compost stacked high on the sidewalk outside the store. These bags were the exact same size as the twelve dollar bags of soil, and guess what they cost? $1.99. Two bucks. Plus, the compost they sell is made from food scraps that are gathered from their stores, taken to a composting facility, and then turned into nitrogen-rich compost. Besides being a brilliant way to put some of their waste to good use, Whole Foods’ compost is of good quality. The bags are warm, a sign of the bacterial activity inside, which is what you want in compost. The company’s soil is also nice, it smells woodsy and slightly sweet. And for two dollars each, these bags of soil and compost are a great buy.

So there you have it, a good reason you should do some cost comparison before buying. If the price of an item seems somewhat exorbitant, call around to make sure that's average. Your wallet will thank you.

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