Products · Super Dirt™
The blend
under the bed.
A four-component bed-establishment soil — compost, screened topsoil, expanded shale, slow-release organic feed. Delivered by the cubic yard. The reason a Scapes bed reads alive in year one and year ten.
All-Organic ProgramBuilt on Houston's MicroLife® · making organic fertilizer since 1988The Premise
A planting is its soil.
On the Texas Gulf Coast, the native soil is clay or sand — almost never both, almost never balanced. Drainage fails in one, nutrients leach in the other. Either way, planting straight into native is a planting that compromises within a season.
Scapes Super Dirt™ is the bed-establishment blend used under every Scapes planting. Composted hardwood for organic matter. Screened topsoil for body. Expanded shale for drainage and CEC. A slow-release organic feed for the first year.
Most soil sold by the bag or the yard is built to a price — clay bodies and non-organic fillers that look like soil in the pile and behave like nothing once it rains. Super Dirt™ is built to a result. Every component in it is there for a reason we can name, in a proportion we can defend.
It is mixed at the studio nursery in 4-yard batches and delivered to the property by the cubic yard. You cannot buy it by the bag — it is mixed for our own installs and it goes out on our own trucks. It is the foundation of every Scapes install — and the cheapest thing you can change about an underperforming bed.
You cannot fake good soil.
The plant always tells the truth about what lies beneath it.
Everything that lasts is built from the ground no one sees. Fix the dirt and you fix the decade — a plant set in good soil looks twice its price within a season. Tend the foundation, and let the world admire only the part that shows.
— J Core, Founder · Still in the dirt
The Blend
Four Super Dirt™ components.
Mixed at the studio nursery. Delivered by the cubic yard.
Composted hardwood.
Aged twelve months, screened for fines. Organic matter for water-holding capacity — and for the biology that rides in with it. The microorganisms in it keep breaking material down and releasing nutrients into the bed, so the soil goes on feeding long after we have driven off. Not bark mulch; not peat.
Screened topsoil.
Sandy loam, screened to ½ inch. Body and structure for the bed — and the steady pH that lets a plant actually take up what is sitting around it. Sourced from a known farm — not a construction-site stockpile.
Expanded shale.
Pelletized expanded shale for drainage, CEC, and aeration. It holds the bed porous so water and air keep reaching the roots instead of packing tight around them — compaction is what quietly kills a bed. The component that makes the difference between a one-season bed and a ten-year bed.
Slow-release organic feed.
A 5% slow-release organic feed worked in at blend time — micro and macro nutrients balanced so they arrive in the proportions a plant can actually absorb and use. Carries the bed through its first year without a top-dress.
The Promise
A bed is its soil.
Get it right at install.
Plants do not fail in the nursery. They fail in the ground they were put in. Every bed we build starts under the plant — amended, drained, and fed — because that is the one part nobody can go back and fix later.
Order
Build the bed on the right soil.
Super Dirt™ delivered by the yard, or by the wheelbarrow load if we install it. The choice is yours. Order with installation or as a top-up for underperforming beds.
