This Year's Leaves ... Next Year's Mulch
 (Read 50+ times)
By David Murray
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As the Autumn leaves fall a great gardening resource is all too often allowed to go to waste. Instead of burning or otherwise disposing of your leaves, why not this year collect them up and store them to produce a luxurious 5-star mulch for your plants in a year or so's time? Leaf mould makes an excellent mulch that aids moisture-retention, helps prevent the growth of weeds, and improves the structure of both sandy and heavy soils.
Leaf mould is compost made only from decayed leaves. As leaves take longer to compost than most items typically added to your main compost bin it is much better to keep them separate and allow them to rot at their own pace to give the dark brown, crumbly material that makes such an excellent soil improver.
Leaves from different trees break down at different speeds. Whereas those from deciduous trees may provided you with a rich, sweet smelling mould in one year, leaves from conifers and evergreen plants will take between two and three years to compost and are best added in small quantities only, shredding them first to help speed up the process.
The production of leaf mould can be accelerated by shredding the leaves. I have a leaf blower and vacuum which gives me very finely chopped leaves, but the engine has been giving trouble so this year I'm using my lawn mower with the blades set as high as they'll go as a kind of combined vacuum cleaner and shredder. It sucks the leaves up from the lawn and chops them reasonably small, if not as fine as the purpose-built machine.
Whereas at other times of the year I put grass cuttings onto the compost heap, when it comes to fall I stir just a small amount of the leaf collection into the top of the main compost bin but then put the bulk of the chopped leaves into a separate open-topped cage of wire netting to rot by themselves for about a year. I used to put the leaves in black plastic bags and store them behind the shed, but find that the leaf mould heap, open to the weather, gives better results.
After one year the mould can be used as a mulch. Leaf mould is not rich in nutrients but is an excellent bulky and fibrous soil conditioner. It contains high levels of humus, which will both help the soil to retain moisture and enable it to hold onto nutrients. It is probably better to leave it for a second year if you're planning to dig it in as a soil improver or to seive it for use as a low-nutrient base for growing seedlings. A mixture of full-strength garden compost from the compost bin and the less-rich leaf mould will also provide an excellent growing medium for potted plants.
So don't waste this year's leaves. They could be worth their weight in gardening gold in twelve months time.
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Author Bio Box: David Murray
 David Murray has been an adviser on managerial and ethical issues to companies, governments and voluntary agencies for almost thirty years, but now as he enters semi-retirement is taking more time to enjoy his garden in the English Midlands, and to write material for several family-owned gardening and bookselling web sites.
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