Leaves comprise our green material. We operate in a 12- x 8-foot sector of a far backyard corner screened by flowering shrubs. Here we work two and one-half to three tons of compost each year.
Ours is a heavily-wooded section, built up with well-spaced homes on what was once the former estate of a shoe polish manufacturer whose hobby was hybridization in the form of nut and fruit tree grafting, variety upon variety.
Consequently, each autumn, we have a plethora of hardwood tree leaves black walnut, heartnut, many types of hickories, apples, pears, hardy pecan, Chinese-American chestnut, filbert, persimmon, and Napoleon cherry. There’s also an abundance of wind-carried leaves from a nearby area of virgin oaks.
With the help of neighbors, we tote our leaves easily with the aid of an uncostly army-surplus tarpaulin and pile hard by the composting bins to wet down for the layering job.
Using 1 x 2-inch heavily galvanized fencing wire, 4′ feet high, we surround the “hummus-factory” site at 4-foot intervals, bracing the fence with 2-inch, 5-foot-tall, Cuprinol-treated hardwood stakes, driven about a foot into the ground.
With a cut section of the fencing, we dissect the enclosure to give us two 6 x 8-foot bins, well-aerated through the wire from without and further ventilated to the base by insertion in each bin’s midsection of two 6-inch square tubes or funnels easily fashioned from the fencing in 2-foot lengths.
Components of Compost
Working one bin against the other, the first with rough material from the last screening and with leftover summer green matter including vegetable tops, pass floral material, partly dried grass clippings, sod, coffee, and tea grounds, weeds before they’re seed-bearing and all flower border stem residues which are not too weedy, we build the contents as follows:
- First 6″ to 8″ inches of green matter or compacted leaves
- 1 inch or so of loam, with a meager film of bacterial activator
- A 1-inch layer of chicken droppings or 2″ inches of horse or cow manure
- A light sprinkling of bone meal and complete fertilizer plus some hardwood ashes, when available, or potash and superphosphate
- 1 inch of loam, with a sprinkling of ground dolomitic limestone.
After each layer comes a good wetting-down, then a repeat performance of the pile-up, finishing at the top with a light layer of earth.
The whole heap is a bit lower in the center than around the outer reaches, this basin-like conformation catching rainwater.
The loam amplifies an activator such as Adco or Activo in the development of bacterial life. The mass is kept nicely moist and shaded.
Earthworms, breeding freely and working assiduously in the layered material, attain surprising numbers, vigor, and size.
We injure as few of these able aids as possible and rescue and toss back into action in the three-times per-batch turning-over of the whole and in the screening task when the rotting is through.
Leaf Mold Compost
The finished product is primarily a leaf mold compost, but a rich, flaky, friable, humusy binder of sandy soils and a loosener, if required, of clayey soils. It is something unobtainable in quantity anywhere at any price for scores of miles around.
What small proportion of the composted material latently decays and is screened out is treated similarly to the original heap well into midsummer when it is priceless as a mulch for rows of vegetables, staked dahlias, and mums.
44659 by C. A. Lovett