Tilling up my leaf pile into the garden soil

I was delivered a large truck full of Oak, Elm, Willow and Elm leafs back in November to use to mulch new holy and wax leaf bushes that I planted in early October. You can say I have way more then I need.

My vegetable garden is about 1500 sq ft. and I have about 1 and 1 1/2 cubic yards of leafs left. When I planted the bushes I also planted annual rye grass in the vegetable garden. I want to Solarize my dirt this spring and was wondering if it would be good or bad if I spread out the leafs and mowed them up before I tilled them into the garden before I covered it all in clear plastic?

Thanks
Jim

yes you could. It would provide long term composting material for the soil. I would add some manure to speed up the breakdown and minimise the nitrogen draw the leaves need to break down. If I only had leaves I would compost them and after adding some manure, blood meal, alfalfa meal use the compost in the garden later. Lucky you.

Soferdig, Trade?...
I've read you have lotsa lovely manure , and unlike Jim (hiya! Thanks for asking that question).. I dont have to have leaves delivered to have tons of Oak,Maple, Hickory etc leaves laying around. I think a trade may be in order,if you can think of someway to bridge half a continent.

Otherwise, Im thinking of buying a reconditioned leaf shredder ofd Ebay. :D

Nin

Jim, Using black or clear plastic to solarize?

Today I go to hand shovel pickup truck bed and trailor of cow manure. It comes expensive here with all of the advil I have to take to be able to move the next day. But are my muscles getting buff. LOL Lots of cow doo doo here in the Flathead Valley. If I could levitate the manure I would be glad to have it fly on the jet stream to GA. GA would be on the news as there has never been manure falling out of the sky like fish do on London.Oh yes and I would not have buff muscles. :]

This weekend I emptied all the old dirt from last summer's "dead" flowerpots and made some observations. Some soils had huge, fat worms. Some soils had NO worms at all. Some soil was lumpy, ooky, clay with not very many worms at all. Some "soil" was that potting stuff with the white styrofoam "pills" in it. NO WORMS WHATSOEVER in any pot that had this stuff in it. Which leads me to believe it ain't dirt at all!

My question was what to do with the old soil? Somewhere on another thread someone said throw it into the flowerbeds. So I targeted a little flowerbed after I scooped back the layer of leaves that were placed on top as mulch for the winter.. Then I started wondering if I would be wasting my good compost by mixing it with the "trash" dirt. So I started separating the soils as best as I could, using the worms to guide me. If there were worms in what seemed to be viable soil, the worms got thrown into my new compost bed and the soil was kept. No worms meant it was trash soil/artificial potting stuff and it went aside. I found a huge container with nothing but sand, too. And then there were the containers with half soil on top of a layer of decomp leaves. This had a few worms, depending on the leaf decomp. Some was kept it if looked viable.

All in all, I threw a good bit of what seemed to be viable soil into that small bed. And, I supplemented and amended this with the newly harvested compost. I believe I did ok, but some help or comments on what and when to toss old soil into the flowerbeds for replanting/amending, and when to simply toss old soil into the trash would be appreciated.

P.S. my logic on the soil was that if the worms liked it, it was worth keeping...

Thanks.

Linda

* gulf streaming cow poo* LOL!!!!!

Well Soferdig, I'd much rather you get buff.*woohoo!* I can truly appreciate the effort it takes, and teh amount of Advil (my choice is Liquigels) it takes to have the best garden in Mt!

Nin- still giggling-( I KNOW Im simple minded..)

You are too kind Ninnian. Thank you. Beware of the Jet stream over GA. LOL

Well, yer most welcome.
An dif teh jet stream will bring us more much needed rain, I wont be the only one who would put up with some ..err.. poo puddles.

You guys can keep your poop. I'm drooling over all those leaves. I did hoard some last fall but I've already used almost 2/3 of it for my compost and my lasagna beds.

Gymgirl: Potting mix does not contain soil. It's not supposed to. It's composed of various things like peat, fine bark, perlite, vermiculite.

Karen

Thanks for that clarification! Now I know why there were no worms in it.