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.
That sure is allot of leaves. How long will it take for them to break down?
It takes about 9 months for the leaves to break down. The more rain we get the faster they break down.
Wow….all those bags. It looks like a trash dump. How many bags of leaves did you collect?
I collected about 1000 bags of leaves. All within a 5 blocks of my house. 40 pickup truck loads.
What a shame all those leaves and plastic trash bags end up in the landfills.
It’s estimated that it may take 100 years for a plastic bag to completely degrade. It’s sort of depressing to think that a plastic bag can outlive the majority of people on the planet.
I lived in Asia until recently and plastic bag use was even worse than the west. I caught the tail end of a typhoon while at a beach resort – the next day the sand couldn’t be seen for thousands of plastic bags washed up from the oceans.
Don’t Bag It – Leaf Management Plan
During the year, at least 20 percent of the solid waste generated by Texans comes from grass clippings, tree leaves and other landscape wastes. Bagging these materials and placing them into the curbside garbage collection system uses valuable landfill space, removes nutrients from the environment, and costs cities and the people of Texas more in increased taxes and service fees. Of the landscape waste, approximately half is composed of tree leaves.
I noticed all the leaf bags are plastic. In my city we have to put our leaves in recyclable paper bags.
Of the 1000 bags of leaves I collected, only 7 were recyclable paper bags. Unless people are forced to use recyclable bags they won’t pay the extra money, and continue to use the cheaper plastic bags.
What a waste to send all those leaves and plastic to the landfills.
Another bonus is I have a ten year supply of trash bags for myself and my neighbors
I’m doing book on gardening and would like to see about using your leaf images in the composting chapter. Would this be possible?
Cam