How to Measure a Cubic Yard of Soil
Most bags of topsoil come calculated by the cubic yard. A cubic yard is measured as an area one yard across, one yard long, and one yard high. However, if you need this imaginary cube to be longer, narrower or shorter, you can alter its dimensions accordingly. Since you may not want to fill your garden beds in one-yard-high chunks, you need to know how to measure out a cubic yard of soil with unorthodox dimensions. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
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1
Decide how deep you want to fill the soil in the area you're measuring out. Make sure to figure it in terms of yards and using fractions. A yard equals 3 feet or 36 inches, so if you're filling 1 1/2 feet or 18 inches deep, you should figure it as 1/2 yard.
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2
Decide how wide you want the filled area to be. Figure this in terms of yards and fractions as well. So if you're filling a bed that's going to be 4 1/2 feet wide, that is the same as 1 1/2 yards wide.
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3
Multiply the two measurements (depth and width) together. Since both measurements are calculated in yards and fractions, your answer will be in yards and fractions also. In the example above, you would have multiplied the 1/2-yard depth by the 1 1/2-yards width to get a figure of 3/4 yards.
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4
Reverse the order of the numbers in the fraction you got. The resulting number is how long a bed you can fill in, using the other dimensions you measured above, with one cubic yard of soil. So in our example, we reverse 3/4 yards to get 4/3 yards as the length of our bed, which we already knew was 1/2 yard deep and 1 1/2 yards wide. Note that this step will not work if the yardage is expressed as a mixed number (a number like 1 or 2 with a fraction tagged on after it); you have to write it as an improper fraction (meaning that it's okay for the top number to be bigger than the bottom number). See Tips for more information on how to do this.
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5
Mark your length and width measurements out with small posts, if necessary, to get a visual display of how much a cubic yard of soil represents. You'll have to imagine the depth measurement, since there's no way to mark it.
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Tips & Warnings
To convert a mixed number into an improper fraction, multiply the whole number (the number in front that's not a fraction) by the bottom number in the fraction. Add the resulting number to the top number in the fraction, then write the result over the original bottom number, and you have your improper fraction. So, to write 2 3/4 yards as an improper fraction, you would multiply 2 by 4 to get 8, then add 8 to 3 to get 11. 11/4 is the same as 2 3/4.
