Topsoil in yards, tons and loads

About 2,000 lb screened and reasonably dry, dropping to roughly 1,800 lb if it has been under cover, and over 2,200 lb after a wet week. That spread of four hundred pounds a yard is not a rounding error — on a six yard order it is more than a ton of water, which is why a load can look and behave differently from the same order placed in August. Sand-heavy soils sit at the top of the range and peat-rich ones at the bottom. The number the yard uses is on their scale ticket, and it beats any figure printed on a website.

Volume yes, weight usually no. A standard six and a half foot bed holds a little over two cubic yards level with the rails, but a single yard of screened topsoil is about a short ton, and the payload sticker inside the door of a half-ton pickup typically reads somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 lb for everything in the vehicle including the people. That is why the yards at a loading dock ask what you are driving before they ask how much you want, and why they will put half a bucket in a light truck and refuse the second.

It loses roughly a sixth of its loose depth to settling, and no, that is a completely different process from compacting stone. Delivered soil is full of air pockets from being lifted and dropped by a bucket; water washes the fine particles down into those voids and gravity closes them, which takes a few weeks and no machinery. Compaction is deliberate mechanical densification of a graded aggregate, done in lifts with a plate so a driveway carries a wheel. Doing that to topsoil ruins it: soil pressed to that density has no pore space left, so it sheds water instead of taking it and roots stop dead at the boundary. The allowance on this page covers the settling that happens on its own.

Order for the finished grade and let the tool add the allowance, which is what it does by default. Someone filling a four inch depression who orders exactly four inches of soil ends up at three and a bit once it rains, and the second delivery costs a whole trip charge to fix a shortfall of a few hundred dollars' worth of material. The reverse mistake is rarer but real: on a lawn already at grade, spreading the padded depth and then rolling it leaves a hump that has to be dragged off again.

Half an inch a pass, and repeat a month later if the dip is deeper than that. Grass levels itself by growing up through thin soil, so a light dressing raked until the blades reappear disappears in two weeks of growth. Bury the canopy under two inches and you have not leveled a lawn, you have killed a strip of it and created a seed bed for whatever blows in. Deep hollows are fixed by lifting the sod, filling underneath and laying it back, not by burying the grass that is there.

Screening, organic content and price, in that order. Screened topsoil has been run through a grid — commonly three-quarters or half an inch — to take out stones, roots and lumps, and it is what you want under sod or in a lawn. Fill dirt is subsoil sold to make up volume: cheap, heavy, often clay, no organic matter, and correct for backfilling a hole under a slab where you do not want anything to decompose and subside later. Bagged garden soil is topsoil already blended with compost and sold at many times the bulk price, which makes sense for a container and no sense for a lawn.

Because a pile on the driveway is not a shape anyone can measure by eye, and because the truck was probably loaded by weight. A cubic yard is a cube a yard on each side, which sounds like a lot and looks like almost nothing tipped out over a driveway. If you want to check the order, spread it and measure the depth over a known area rather than guessing at the heap. If the yard sells by weight, ask for the ticket: it will show gross, tare and net, and net divided by their density figure is the yardage you received.