The leaves are falling, which means it’s time to start raking and figuring out what to do with them. Turn your leaves into mulch this year!
This is an excerpt Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening Will Bonsall. It has been adapted to the web.
Photos courtesy Will Bonsall, unless otherwise stated.
Making Mulch with Fallen Leaves
A couple of stories will help those who are unsure about the fertilizing properties of tree leaves. Farmington is 8 miles away and I haul their leaves. I’m doing the people of Farmington a favour by hauling theirs away (the town used to do it but no more), plus they’re already raked into piles, relatively free of twigs and branches.
Of course I always ask the owner if I may take them, even though the response is predictably something like “What! Is the pope Catholic?” At one home on a shady side street,I asked the owner, an elderly woman with a charming Austrian accent, and she answered graciously, “No, I want them myself.” Intrigued, I asked wherefore, and she replied, “I need them for my garden.”
Fallen Leaves: How to Make the Most of Them
Delighted, i probed further. She, having no known ideological views on the subject, relied exclusively on the maple leaves because they were what she had—the shade-free portion of her yard was wholly occupied by her garden, so there was little lawn to supply grass clippings, and she had no access to manure.
She didn’t have any formal system to shred or compost; she just said: “I mull them over from time to time.” That had been her “system” for years, and the heavy-feeding cabbages and leeks I saw testified to her success. The huge pile of leaves in her yard was waiting to be converted into next year’s sauerkraut!
Fallen Leaves and their Stories
I convinced the Town of Farmington’s street commissioner to have their leaves delivered to my house instead of the dump. He quickly agreed that it made sense to everyone. The first two truckloads of leaves arrived at my leaf pile, and I thought to myself that I could now simply wait for the windfall.
Next year they didn’t show up, so I asked the street commissioner, what gives? It turns out they are needed at the landfill. Need them? I repeated stupidly. Ayuh. It seems that they are needed to clean the stables at the fairground. Ah, says I knowingly, it’s to balance the excess nitrogen in the manure.
Weeell, not quite, he corrects me; it’s rather that all that sawdust bedding makes the piles cold, despite the pony doo-doo. What! They’re using “my” leaves to heat up horse-hockey so it will be well composted? It does? Yes, I assured the commissioner without irony, it works as smooth as shit. Now understand, this good fellow was not a vegan, not into organic or sustainability—for all I know he could be a Republican—yet don’t try to tell him that leaves lack nitrogen.
Shredding Fallen Leaves
The majority of my uses for leaves involve shredding. This requires some sort of shredder. In my case I have an Amerind-MacKissick chipper/shredder designed to work as an attachment with my Gravely 12-horsepower walking tractor, but the chipper/shredder can be powered by any other PTO source or can be purchased with its own self-contained engine.
A 12 HP motor will do the job for chipping brushes, but it may not be enough to shred leaves.. An advantage of mounting this shredder on something is that it is easier to move about—on its own it’s cumbersome to move any distance.
How to Choose a Shredder
My Gravely, by the way, is a magnificent machine, which is probably why Gravely’s are no longer made. Because such walking tractors have several interchangeable attachments (mowers, snow blowers, tillers, and more), you don’t need to own several engines, all of which require maintenance.
This means, on the other hand, that if you only have one tractor in operation, then you will not be able to do any of the jobs. The hassle of changing attachments shouldn’t be too great and it should not discourage you from choosing this option.
Shredding Plants and Leaves
The safety grating on my chipper/shredder won’t allow anything less than 3⁄4 The product is uniform in consistency and has an inch-sized hole (1.9 cm). This makes it perfect for application. With a rubber barrel of leaf shreds on my shoulder, I walk along the paths and create a blizzard with my free hand.
The crop plants usually grow to a height of a few inch, and then the shreds fall and settle around the plants. This creates a compact and effective mulch. That’s why it is important that they be consistently fine—confetti-like: so that no clumps of whole leaves will smother the crop. Also, shredded leaves stay put in a breeze much better than whole leaves, especially once they’ve been wet and settle into a tight “felt.”
Why shred fallen leaves?
Twigs can also be used to shred the leaves. Although I remove the larger branches for chipping separately, most leaves have a lot of fine twigs that are a nuisance to pick out, yet I don’t want them left whole. This is a problem with leaves that are collected from forests or lawns with large old trees. These trees have the deepest roots, and therefore contain more trace minerals. When fed through the shredder they are reduced to harmless little chips that bother nothing, although you may need to pre-snap longer twigs so they don’t block the chute.
If I’m using partly wet leaves they will plug up the grate, but if I remove the grate they’ll come out too fast, only half shredded. As long as I can go through them again, half-shredded leaves are fine. They look like confetti. This is a good option for mulching pathways and crops with a wider spacing, as well as composting. (Remember, once the grate is removed, there’s nothing between you and the spinning hammer mills, so stand clear.)
Keeping Fallen Leaves in Stock
I need to stockpile as much confetti as possible when they’re crispy and dry, and so I race to shred those as fast as they come in, and pack them into a large (8 × 10 × 4-foot, or 2.4 × 3.0 × 1.2 m) covered plank bin that holds roughly 2 tons. If I’ve got a lot of confetti to store, I’ll put it in feedbags and cover it with a waterproof tarp. During the winter, I stack them up along the outside of the door to my cellar as insulation.
There are many ways to shred leaves.
The best way to shred your leaves is with a powerful chipper/shredder, but that isn’t the only one. My father would pile up his leaves by the garage and use his push-powered mower to run over the pile, stirring the leaves between passes. Tom’s cousin piles his leaves into a very long and deep pile (about 3 feet or 0.9 meters) before he repeatedly runs through the pile with his rototiller.
And of course, we all know the hands-down most efficient way of shredding leaves: You gather them all into a huge pile in the middle of the lawn and tell your kids and all the neighbour kids: “Stay out of this.” Within hours the pile will be reduced to molecules. To speed up the process, you can hang an old car tire from a branch above.
Consistency is key when shredding leaves
These alternatives are not consistent; some will be reduced to powder and others will have large pieces. This isn’t a big problem for some uses (say, compost), but for mulching closely spaced crops, including grain, the crude shreds are more difficult to apply. The coarser shreds from a lawnmower are ideal for mulching crops with a wider spacing, such as tomatoes and cabbage, or paths.
I have more leaves than I am able to shred at once. If I’m running out of time, I store whole leaves in a hex wire (aka chicken-wire) enclosed leaf dump that I cover with a heavy tarp. The leaves remain dry until the next spring or summer when I shred them.
The bottom layer may become damp due to the moisture wicking from the ground. When I’m short of confetti for the next spring, sometimes I simply spread out the dampish leaves on a large tarp and let them re-dry. After a couple of hours, I shred the leaves. Although I normally use the crude double-shredding method without the grates in place.
Fallen Leaves – To Shred or Not to shred?
It is important to shred leaves before composting them, as whole leaves form a mat of soggy leaves that takes forever to decompose. It was this very reason that made me shred. I found myself using less hay, and other materials in my compost pile because I could only use thin layers of leaves.
My obsession with eco-efficiency is compatible with the fact that leaves, once shredded, can make up the majority of my compost. It would be impossible to compost corn, amaranth and sunflower stalks without first shredding. By reducing volume and exposing the surface of these materials, I increase the rate at which they decay. This, combined with the biological heat, results in a superior final product.
Recommended Reading
The Ultimate Guide To Sheet Mulching
Mulch 101: Why Mulch is Important