Going Green – Collect Leaf Bags For Garden Compost
Don’t throw those bags of leaves in the trash! Put them to work saving you money by enriching your yard and flower/vegetable gardens, by loosening clay soil and by not having to buy all those plastic bags that continue to be blight on our environment. Throwing away your yard leaves will deprive your soil of a natural source of nutrients. A better alternative is to use the leaves to your advantage and “recycle” them back to the soil. In time the leaves will naturally decompose into leaf mold. You can speed this process up by ‘composting’ leaves and adding organic materials to the heap. Leaf compost and leaf mold will, in time, turn into ‘humus’. This rich, black/brown and porous material forms the organic portion of the soil.
Piling the leaves in the back yard will do for a basic plan. Or dumping them into a bin will also work. We have had enormous success piling and spreading several hundred bags of leaves, collected right from the neighborhood, 3-4 ft high right on the garden. Whole or shredded either will work. Shredding your leaves is best for a faster breakdown into compost. It’s best to layer your leaves with kitchen waste, grass clippings, manure and soil, it’s not needed but one of these is better than none. Wetting the layer down with the hose will help keep it moist and keep the larger leaves from blowing away on those windy fall days. The ambitious gardener will try to rotate or just periodically turn the pile mixing the ingredients and organic materials.
We have several different methods by which we compost in the garden. One is to create ‘walkways’ in several different directions. Putting down a layer of newspaper right on the ground followed by several feet of leaves will over winter make great paths through the garden that will be ‘weed & grass’ free come summer because the newspaper will kill off the unwanted weeds and will biodegrade into the soil too.
Another is to till up the area of interest then pile shredded leaves on the tilled soil and lightly hoe the two together. Last but not least by digging those ‘tomato’ and ‘pepper’ holes in the fall and dumping a whole bag of shredded leaves in the 12-18′ hole and mixing the soil with it makes for excellent growing environments the next summer.
If a smaller flower garden is what you have use your decomposed leaves as mulch to pile around all the flowers and the whole landscape as well. The mulch will provide nutrients as well as a means to retain moisture, holding several hundred times its own weight in water during the summer heat and by penetrating the soil to work as a conditioner.
Recycling your leaves and turning them back into your yard, landscape and gardens is simple and will provide it with all the natural benefits in a cost effective way.
