Composting Leaves

Yes it’s that time of year again as Autumn embraces us and the temperatures drop and the daylight hours shorten and many put the timber they have cut and seasoned in the home ready for lighting their log burner and the gardens look bleak after a summer of producing food and filling our stores, pantries and freezers with fresh and natural food, it’s time for many plants to shed their leaves and the leaves drop. Many people succumb to the indoctrination of leaves are bad, and while to an extent it may be true as wet leaves are slippery, so may not be ideal for many people; they fall into the commerce trap of buying yet another gadget they don’t need yet feel compelled to buy one as Joe Bloggs down the road has one and they don’t want leaving out, yes this indoctrination really works for many people who are quickly parted from their hard earned cash.

Have you ever walked through a wood and thought about this wood and noticed you are walking on leaf mould which is laying on the ground and wondered how this excellent compost is made and why it is so nice and crumbly with a lovely smell? No, many people haven’t and those that have start investigating. Leaf mould is unlike ordinary composting as instead of taking months it takes years and what you are standing on has taken hundreds of years to make and get there as it is nature and the perfect example of the circle of life in motion and you can see it happening under your feet.

What is happening is actually quite simple and it is the tree taking part of what is keeping it alive and growing and thriving and making its own food for the next few years, so perhaps a wood is a series of gardeners growing their own food and storing it, now there’s a thought.

If you have the garden space and the time you can actually make this leaf mould and according to the variety of leaves you have you can make a useful leaf mould compost or soil conditioner in around a year, or it can take as long as seven years if you have conifers, but you can make it easily and with little effort if you can leave it.

Now we can dismiss the myth that leaf blowers are better for the environment than a traditional rake and testing has confirmed this is a myth and shows the traditional rake only collects leaves and actually scrapes the ground which aerates it and they only take off what you scrape and not what you don’t scrape. Meanwhile your leaf blower removes all wet leaves and blows them away along with anything lighter than the wet leaf which includes many things beneficial to your garden and contrary to popular belief the leaf blower is no faster at removing leaves than a traditional garden rake.

To begin you need an enclosure and this is only to contain the leaves as in nature they drop and the microbes begin their work and they attract more microbes which break the leaves down and as they sit on the floor and get rained on in winter, and the sun on them to dry them out in summer; we basically recreate those conditions. If we begin with four sturdy corner posts in wood and we attach the mesh to the first post and wrap it around all four posts and nail it to the posts on the first three posts and cut it to length for the fourth post and cut some steel bar to push through the mesh and tie this to the fourth post we now have a gate.
Take your raked leaves and ensure they are wet and if not then water them and put them into your mesh cage and basically leave them unless you have grass clippings as the mush they normally create is absorbed by the dried/drying leaves which attract more beneficial microbes. Which mesh? I prefer standard stock mesh which is used for sheep and cattle as this has the 6” (150mm) squares and these are large enough for hedgehogs and other creatures to get through but you can use what you have. What do you do next? Absolutely nothing as nature is doing it for you and if you use oak or hornbeam leaves as these compost the quickest you can use the first batch of compost as quickly as one year, but it won’t be pure compost as it will be coarse and still composting and you can fill raised beds with it and top off with compost and it still composts. If you leave it for the full two years you will end up with the lovely humus which you can use; the slowest composters are conifers and evergreens and these can take up to seven years so patience can be a must.

What if you don’t have the room for a composting mesh frame? Use other containers and the most obvious is the black plastic bag and to use this you take your form and puncture it with many holes for the leaves to breathe, and you simply stack them anywhere convenient and leave it for the prescribed 2 to 7 years depending upon leaf type. If you have a mesh cage you can continue topping it up and basically build it up and continually top it up and it will produce leaf mould for years or even decades. Many people are disliking plastic in the garden so simply use hessian or jute sacks instead as these are natural material and breathe, and yes you can top up your sacks as they compost down; you can use other things such as the builders bag instead of throwing it away and while plastic, they are woven and breathe.

Can you mix leaf mould with other compost? Actually you can and you can blend it into beds to recondition existing soils and if you sieve it you can use it as potting compost or you can add other natural materials such as bonemeal or blood fish and bone, or even lime or Epsom Salts to get the mixture you want.