Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The adventures of Shaun, Cindy, Abbey, and Quinn
Bicycling in Michigan
I'm going to have to change this!
Labels
- Kids and family (100)
- tandem bicycling (54)
- mountain biking (46)
- bicycle commuting (17)
- running (13)
- Soma Doublecross (6)
- Kona Ute (4)
And they're oak leaves!
ReplyDeleteIn Massachusetts, we had tons of maple leaves. I could compost them in 6 months.
Here in Washington, our only sizable deciduous tree is an oak. Nice tree, but the leaves are thick and packed with tannins. I'm still trying to compost some of our 2006 leaves. 2007 and 2008 went into the yard waste bins to be picked up. Of course, it didn't help that a mole got into the compost bin and ate all my worms.
I've read that if you add sufficient nitrogen, perhaps in the form of the right sort of manure, you can get oak leaves to compost in a year. I'm very interested in the possibility of composting our leaves, at least some of them. My estimate is that we would need a capacity of 10 cubic yards to handle each year's leaves. I'm not sure how our neighbors would feel about such a large composting structure in our back yard. It would need to look nice, and therefore could be a bit costly.
ReplyDeleteWe have four worm bins in the basement that we use for household vegetable waste. No complaints from the neighbors about those.
If you shred the leaves first, they will take up less space in the compost bin. We don't have a leaf shredder, but we do have a mulching mower - shred (reasonably) and bag at the same time, them dump into the bins. I would recommend wearing a dust mask.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, one year in Massachusetts, I traded leaves with a guy for the veggies he grew.
I used to try to collect all the leaves. It would be at least 15-20 bags, on a tiny 1/10 acre lot, and the only sizable tree on our property is a redbud. But there are huge trees all around whose leaves fall in our yard, a giant silver maple in my neighbor's front yard, various oaks, maples, sycamores, beeches, black locusts (no sizable leaves to speak of), tulip poplars, a walnut, etc. We have an electric blower that reverses to act as a shredder, which I thought would be great to reduce the bulk and help them to compost faster, but it's SLOW and doesn't work unless the leaves are dry--we don't really have a lot of dry fall days in a row here. So this year I've just been piling them on our sloping side yard in an attempt to smother all the English ivy there. David added a few bags of sawdust from his shop to it. It's made quite a mountain--I hope it works! We'll see what it looks like next year to see if it's ready for the shady woodland garden of ferns and moss that we're dreaming about. If not, we'll just wait another year or so. I also leave a lot of them on the "lawn" areas--the areas with sparse sprigs of grass where I haven't planted anything more interesting. I wouldn't really mind if the last bits of grass just went away. I think we'd be happier with dead leaves, moss and the occasional mushroom, like the ground in the woods behind our house. If a leaf falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it need to be raked?
ReplyDeleteI was tempted this year to simply leave the leaves where they fell. It would be my preference. There are plenty of patches of forest in our area where the ground is covered in soft organic layers of leaves, and grass doesn't grow. I would like very much to allow our yard to become more like those wild patches. Doesn't it seem silly that we should to put so much effort into removing the leaves so they don't kill the grass so we have something to weed and mow? So much energy goes towards maintaining our lawns in such an unnatural state. For what purpose?
ReplyDeleteI have been considering an expansion of our grassless shrubby areas. I would like to cut in half the area of green grass in our yard that requires raking and mowing, with the intention of improving wildlife habitat, reducing maintenance costs and energy consumption, without compromising the value or usability of our yard. I think it's very realistic.