Fall leaves

Katye- take care of yourself. I think your weather in general helps your compost along. How is your winter, mild? your zone is the same as mine. But the fall leaves are dry most of the time and when you pile them dry you'd be surprised at how hard it can be to wet them.

I am bummed out cuz a lot of people were working in the yard this weekend but I think the yard waste pickup will come around too early in the am for me to get any good leaf bags. Still, leaf season goes well into december, even january.

I found out last year that a bag of beech leaves and nuts from the fall makes a great ant city in the summer. eek

bonjjon, a lady once told me that Borax (silica salt) was a way to control ants around a campsite. I can't confirm this but I don't think it would be harmful to your leaf compost piles if you sprinkled some on the ground.

thanks, mraider. How's Helena these days? lived for 6 years in Idaho Falls myself.

Helena's good. Between gardening and fishing my days stay busy. In the dark hours I do some technical writing and read DG threads looking for ways to improve my gardening skills. I worked for an engineer firm for a while in Sturbridge Mass and did some traveling along the east coast. Beautiful country.

well, I never got up to Helena, but I did get to Boseman for skiing. beautiful country up there, too. went to school for a time outside of Boston. Mass. is a fun place. Lots to do. They have much better fall color than we get here.

still miss trout fishing in ID.

I have fished most of my life and have had good success with trout since moving to Helena. We do fish two/three times a week. Gardening has been a new venture since moving to Helena seven years ago. My yard was vertually a bed of rock and rock dust. I had only a shovel to start with and I hand dug and gratted out the rock before adding horse manure to make the remaining rock dust viable. My garden is now 90' x 60' with three 60' x 40' rows for berry plants. The neally tough job was planting fruit trees. At roughly two feet down there is a shale layer which must go to China. Gardening is such an adventure. I had no idea how much work and fun it would be. I feel better now than I have in years and I have no doubt that gardening saved my life.

playing in the dirt is decidedly healthy! would have thought, though, with Montana's rich grasslands, that there would be more soil for you to start with. LOL

I picked up a load of horse manure yesterday. It was said to be "at least 6 months old" but I don't know. it still had that ammonia smell. made sure it was spread out thin before all this rain we're to get from Ida. it was spitting rain as I spread, and it's to rain 3-7" until late Thursday night. that should help rinse this manure, shouldn't it?

Although the prarie grass lands extend into Montana they did not quite reach my back yard. My garden is in the middle of the Helena Valley and we are completely surrounded by mountains. I believe between my contractor and a glacier, most of the rock from the valley was deposited in my back yard. Seven years of hand digging left me with a garden of rock dust or clay, which required a pick ax to penetrate after a rain. Fortunately a neighbor lady had a mountain of horse manure which I generously applied to my garden, as much as a foot deep. It was a bear to till in, but when I completed the task I sent a composite soil sample to my favorite soils lab in Dodge City for their garden analysis. Everything came back too high, especially the Nitrogen. I didn’t care. I went ahead and planted in the following spring and not a problem one. Each fall I apply additional fresh horse manure from the two horse pile and till it in, wait for a rain, and till once more. And every year the soil looks darker and is much easier to till. In the spring I add composted horse manure directly to seed rows and holes I dig for tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and a nice big pumpkin plant. I have never had a single problem with this method. Maybe a bit weedy, but that’s just part of gardening. I figure a garden without weeds isn’t much of a garden.

Every Fall, friends and neighbors bring their leaves to me and we pile them along the parking strip next to my home. At this time, there is a huge pile about 4' high, 4' wide and nearly 50' long. I leave them totally alone all Winter and all Summer, letting Nature work on them. Come late August or early September, I simply rake them into smaller piles and they crumble as if I had run them through a shredder. Most of them go into making Fall compost at my market garden about two blocks away, although I keep some for Fall mulch on my flower beds here at home.

The city here will vacuum tomorrow, I picked up 38 bags yesterday and today, working on cutting them with the mower.
As I opened the bags, I found 1/2 had been run over with the mower, WEEEE
The mower sure compresses the leaves.
I just finished reading Patricia Lanza book Lasagna Gardening. So I plan to buld 2 or 3 more beds.
The books make it sound so easy ^_^
Well back to my leaves.

It is easy rentman, and to tell the truth, I don't go to as much trouble as that book. I do put down heavy paper or cardboard first to block weeds, but then I just start piling with whatever comes along. Starting in the fall, you have lots of time before first planting. If your leaves are in brown paper bags, that paper works very good.

I've been so inspired by this thread that, despite having a lot of fallen oak leaves on my property already, I asked a nice man if I could have HIS brown bags of leaves as well. I was passing by his place and saw several bags stacked up in front ready for transport to the dump. He looked slightly surprised but said "sure" and I crammed them into my little truck and took 'em home (returned the bags.) Ended up going back three times for a total of 25 bags. My husband looked even more surprised and said I must be the only person in Massachusetts who was bringing leaves back TO the house, rather than taking them away.
Still have to shred them, but I'VE GOT LEAVES!!

and you've got future black gold!

Most landscapers have to pay to dispose of the leaves they collect from properties they service. Call a few & see if they'll deliver a couple of truckloads to you for free. They do for me. And I'm not talking pickup trucks either!

I have a couple of local landscaper/yard men who supply me almost year-round with grass clippings and leaves. They know I can't accept grass clippings that have been treated with weed 'n feed until the third mow after such treatment and every Fall I get tons of leaves from them. Mind boggling to reflect that every leaf eventually becomes nutrients in my garden beds!

I'm always amazed that I keep adding to my raised beds but they never get full. Right now the chopped leaves are stacked about 18 inches above the ledge, by spring it will be level, and next fall ready to fill again. I can use my hands to dig down almost 2 feet deep, and if I walk on it I sink down into it. I could kick myself for all the years I bought soil.

I just spent 4 blissful hours shredding leaves.
Tomorrow I'll put them right back in my woodland garden where I gathered them up.
Last couple weekends have been spent the same way.
This is the first year I've made an effort to pick up the leaves in my woodland.
I used to let mother nature take it's own course.
But I've really gotten into spring woodland wildflowers and the unshredded oak leaves can smother them.
So hopefully next spring, my little guys will be able to fight thru the leaves easier.
Still more to be done, but I'm not sure if the weather will continue to hold out.

It's been hard to shred them, with as wet as it has been.

Weerobin, I've just done the same thing to a bed in the front of my house: raked up the leaves and then (laboriously) shredded them with a string-trimmer in a garbage can. It takes a while, but I love dumping out the shreds back into the beds. Of course, it takes about 3 bags of regular leaves to make 1 bag of shreds, so I add extra from the 25 bags I scored from that nice man.
This year I'm going to try something that I read about: I'm going to fork a layer of compost on top of the shredded leaves and leave it there all season. I've heard that this encourages more worms to come to the banquet.

well, I'm going for it. put down doubled cardboard, flat moving boxes, to be precise. DH and DD immediately started dumping mowed leaves atop. I'm still moving iris pots (for sale next year) on top, then putting ground up pine tree inbetween the pots and for paths between pots. sort of half winter protection for the irises while they grow, and half lasagna bed. the boxes and shredded pine were free, but had to haul, load and unload ourselves.

hope this works, helps keep weeds out. think it will? we've already started putting the pots on it. it sure looks better than the plastic I put down, which didn't work - the weeds were still alive 4 weeks later underneath - and they were green and sassy!

next set of free moving boxes on craigslist I find will do the remote iris garden, with irises in the ground.

Do any of your communities offer free composted leaf mold? Most of the ones around here do. I put that down first, before the freshly shreaded leaves. For the beds that need serious enrichment, I put down a layer of mushroom soil too. This is also when I add the minerals, rock dust, gypsum, iron, whatever they need in the rotation.

Don't forget to drive around to restaurants with buckets and collect coffee grounds, the worms just love coffee. They will look at you like you are nuts, but who cares??

ours sells the leaf mold - which is really wet leaves that have been sitting piled up for a while.

but they sell it very cheap. an earthmover scoop for $20. I can only fit 1/2 scoop in my Frontier, have to pay for a whole, but it's still good. I put some down last year under my oaks. they loved it. now it's just black dirt there.

Hmmm Bonjon, I wonder why it's like that. Ours looks just like black dirt, but it's nice and fluffy. I pick up coffee grinds from Starbucks all year long and just walk around the grounds tossing handfuls. When I moved here 4 years ago, there wasn't a worm to be found. Now they are everywhere. Gotta love Starbucks.

Our city gives away leaf mold to residents, but you have to haul yourself of course.
Those of us without a pickup are out of luck.

I'm going to check with some of our local starbucks. would love to see more worms in my yard. they are only in my flower beds now. hard clay, I guess, does not lend itself to worm growth.

My local s bucks has gone, over the last few years, from "Huh, What?" to now having a small bin that may have the foil repacked grounds. When its empty they might just pull out the 'tall kitchen' size bag from under the making area and give it out. (no more giving me a huge doubled garbage bag which I gladly re used!!) And I also just sprinkle directly in beds.
Sadly I have gone from 'Huh, what' to 'Grande mocha frappucino please!!' or some such, still don't really know what's what LOL

I hit iHOP, McDonalds, Bob Evans, and any other places that do breakfasts. I take in a clean large tupperware type container that has a handle, and they empty the coffee pots of the grounds. They are usually still hot. I transfer them to a small trash can in my car and head to the next place.

Now that's using your noggin'!

Update : The area where we cleaned out more Burmuda grass has now been covered with a thick layer of cardboard, and bags of leaves. I plan to poke holes in the bags and let the rain/earthworms work their magic this winter. Hopefully, next spring the area will be ready for the sweet potato slips I've already ordered from New Hope Seed Co

http://www.newhopeseed.com/

I ordered slips from this company last year, and they were really nice large, healthy ones.