Having fun this autumn – while at the same time creating a valuable garden resource. The use of fallen leaves into compost is a free way of getting the best into your garden each spring.
My grandkids were in their element at the weekend as the main lot of falling leaves from the neighbour’s trees lined our driveway and courtyards as they do for some weeks every autumn.
Quite apart from being something to play in, and to remove to avoid slipping over when they get wet, leaves from trees provide a fantastic compost ingredient, and if collected now and put into a set aside area for composting, will provide your gardens with some fantastically rich nutrients when you start to look at turning your gardens in early spring.
This carbon dense resource does even better when you add grass clippings to it.
The one thing it doesn’t have is nitrogen, and to help expedite this along with grass clippings and other green waste, I’ll grab a few bags of coffee grounds often thoughtfully put out by service stations or cafes and turn the mix well. Using the same pile each year is a great place to start, because there will be some of the compost left over from the year before that has the bio environment needed to kickstart the new pile off.
The leaves, once put in place in their pile, need to be moist and if you want to get things moving along quicker, put an old piece of carpet over the top of the pile.
This helps keep moisture in and if your pile is kept in a shaded area, even better.
The leaves retain heat in the centre which helps with the breakdown, providing a bio-diverse environment, which worms and other organisms love, getting into to aerate and provide additional nutrients.
Some advocates recommend leaf piles be no more than a metre high by a metre wide, but to be honest, they all go into one pile in our shaded garden area and with the addition of grass clippings and whatever other additional green waste we might have, each year the compost provided gets our gardens well and truly enriched.
There are some leaves you shouldn’t use; eucalyptus and black walnut both have built-in pesticides which inhibit seed germination, so steer clear of these when making compost piles.
If you have a ride-on mower, and if the leaves on your trees are big ones, mowing them into small scraps first will help move the pile along faster as well in terms of decomposing.
Make sure you turn the pile over with a garden fork from time to time, this helps aerate it and, particularly, if using grass clippings, which can matt and lessen the necessary oxygen required if you don’t.
You don’t need to add fertiliser or any other additive to a leaf compost pile – it will do the job itself admirably well.
