Landscaping calculators.

Outside the house, most material is heavy, loose and priced two ways. Soil comes in bags labeled in cubic feet or dry quarts, or delivered by the cubic yard or by weight; asphalt leaves the plant by the ton. Each calculator here starts from the ground as it is measured and ends with what to order and how it arrives.

Soil for beds, lawns and low spots

The Soil calculator adds several areas into one order: raised beds counted by the bed, a round bed, a lawn to topdress and a low spot to fill, each at its own depth. It compares bags with a delivered yard at your prices, and turns the loose volume into the weight a pickup, a trailer or a wheelbarrow has to carry.

Mulch around beds, trees and play sets

The Mulch calculator treats a tree ring as a ring, with the trunk left bare at the gap each publisher asks for, and subtracts last year's layer before adding a new one. Under a play set the depth comes from the height of the equipment, as the Consumer Product Safety Commission's home handbook sets it, over a zone wider than the set itself.

Sod for a new lawn

The Sod calculator counts a lawn in pieces, not square feet: each rectangle is laid out in the brick pattern extension services ask for, the cut ends paired from shared slabs, and pallets follow from the size of piece the farm cuts. It also plugs a lawn from sod at UF/IFAS spacings and works out the topsoil to spread first.

Asphalt for a driveway

The Asphalt calculator takes a driveway that is not one rectangle, a run, a pad, a flared apron and a turnaround, and splits the tonnage between base and surface courses. The unit weight is shown with the source it comes from, and the order is rounded to the loads the plant delivers.

Measure the ground, then weigh the order

Soil and asphalt work the same way round: area and depth give a volume, and a published weight per cubic yard turns that volume into tons, because bulk material can be sold by weight and every truck's limit is a weight. Mulch is the exception: NIST's method-of-sale regulation has it sold by volume only, so its page stops at cubic yards and trips, and sod is bought by the piece and the pallet. Gravel and pavers are not calculated here yet.