Urban Gardener: Fallen Leaves are Gardener’s Friends
Saturday, November 09, 2013
Instead of bagging up all those fall leaves and putting them out at the curb, turn them into compost.
Gardeners have no patience with those who complain. Optimism is the watch word among gardeners and nowhere is hope more expressive when it is surrounded by pavement and close built houses. Urban gardeners may at first appearances be challenged to find good soil and organic materials for their gardens. Puzzle no more, countless leaves are falling to the ground and studious homeowners and groundskeepers rake them into cheerful piles before stuffing full large brown paper bags. I comb my neighborhood for these bags of leaves and accept the odd bits of junk as a small price to pay for a bonanza of free organic material. Bring home the bags of leaves. I pile them in a convenient out of the way corner and get to them when I can. Sometimes cold weather steals away the time and interest and the bags are good for spring. Until then many methods can be used to compost the leaves.
The complexity of leaves
Leaves are a complex study in themselves. They have signature shapes, textures, and sizes. All plants have chemical descriptions beyond their translation of carbon and sunlight into useful nutrients, our food. Leaves contain in microcosm these chemical markers making some more equal than others. Don’t be misled by those who urge only this type or that. Healthy soils full of microscopic organisms reduce in stages the most sturdy pine cones into fine soil. For most gardening purposes the type of leave isn’t as important as exposing as much leaf surface as possible to soil. A leaf left undisturbed in normal circumstances becomes compost in about a year. Gardeners can speed up this process into just a few months. I use several methods at the same time. You can too.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTMost lawn mowers will chop up leaves. I have the most token of lawns and spend the first part of the fall garden season gathering bag after bag of leaves. Your friends and neighbors will be amused. Enjoy it. Let them laugh. Let others rake for you although I find much joy in the pure and simple actions of raking colorful leaves from bright green grass. Remove leaves from grassy places. Leaves left on grass demonstrate your goals: they cover seedlings, such as crabgrass, and naturally form thick layers. Left on grass, the turf will die out.
Leaves are gourmet food for a wide array of small creatures. Worms love leaves and eat enormous ratios of leaf to worm. Worm castings are powerful fertilizers and encourage growth. Use your leaves to feed the worms in the garden. The more broken up the leaf, the faster microbes and worms can digest them.
A labor of love
If you enjoy trenching your garden, an annual event for many gardeners, then leaves are perfect for you. Dig one spade’s depth into your soil and pile a row of soil facing you and behind the trench. Fill the trench with leaves and repeat the dug row again, burying the leaves in the former trench and opening another. Continue onward, covering the leaves with garden soil. Progress is continuous. You are essentially working backwards, ever mindful of what’s behind you as you trench around permanent plantings, mindful of spring bulbs, and mindful of properly bending, lifting, raking. Soon a rythmn starts. Labor is a beautiful act. Allow yourself to become one with purpose. Time will dissolve. The past becomes the future in silent homage to seasons. Toss into the trenches any organic matter that may come your way. I find cities to be enormous storehouses of organic materials.
Meet your neighbors over a rake. Soon you’ll have new friends, large institutions often employ machines and crews to collect leaves, often shredding them in the process. A smile, a handshake, and you may find yourself helping solve another’s disposal problem. Happily, although countless tons of leaves become part of the waste stream; municipal and educational institutions participate in municipal composting programs. Many community gardens benefit from municipal composting programs primarily based on leaf collections. Remember those brown bags on the sidewalk?
Leaves as mulch and compost
I sometimes use bags of leaves as mulch. The bags are surprisingly sturdy and retain their integrity wherever not touching the ground. Such bagged mulch is perfect for protecting yearling trees and shrubs or rows of cultivated winter crops. In this case, allow plenty of space between the plants and the bags of leaves. When mud season is over next spring, simply trench the bagged leaves into the cultivated rows, now long harvested and turn over the protected soils formerly under the bags of leaves. Don’t throw out the brown paper bags, rip them open and into large squares, you’ll have perfect brown paper mulches to cover the garden and prevent any weeds from emerging. I simply weight down the paper with a shovel or two of soil.
The common compost pile works fine too, leaves a few inches thick, cover with soil, alternate this regimen until you’ve reached a convenient height. Tear apart next spring. I have wire fencing I’ve used for years for such piles, often right in the garden, careful to build in the sun and open to the elements. We merely duplicate the natural processes of millennia to build topsoil.
Long after the rich aromas and colors of fall are gone under snow and ice, leaves will keep your soil friable and well fed. Worms will persist in their endless appetite. Birds will remain nearby to eat the worms and peck about the soil. Snow and rain will trickle through the leaves and what was once will be new again as fresh green plants emerge from soils dark with humus. Year after year, soil improves and becomes richer, more fertile, boasting larger yields of chemical free vegetables, herbs and flowers. Fallen leaves are gardener’s friends.
Leonard Moorehead is a life-long gardener. He practices organic-bio/dynamic gardening techniques in a side lot surrounded by city neighborhoods in Providence RI. His adventures in composting, wood chips, manure, seaweed, hay and enormous amounts of leaves are minor distractions to the joy of cultivating the soil with flowers, herbs, vegetables, berries, and dwarf fruit trees.
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