To mow, rake, bag, or compost Autumn leaves?
Every fall most gardeners feel little pangs of guilt over how they handle garden debris, knowing full well most can be mowed, mulched or composted and added back to the garden to improve soil and recycle nutrients.
But it’s easier to rake and bag, right? Not really. Best compromise: mow as long as you can, then when it starts burying the lawn move the excess to underneath trees or behind shrubs. All but pine straw and magnolia leaves will be gone by spring.
If there’s still too much, make a somewhat neat leaf pile some-where, and let it do its thing naturally. Plant ferns or shrubs there next year.
Or compost it the easy way. Believe me, after doing doctoral-level research on composting, I can make your ears bleed with details of ideal carbon: nitrogen ratio, bioactivation, thermophilic vs. psychrophilic bacteria, leachates, flocculation, and static aeration.
I’m that guy who drives around looking for curbside bags of chopped leaves and grass clippings. One time I tried the fast but labor-intensive “hot” composting by building a bin filled with a mixture of shredded brown leaves and green grass clippings and mixed in some old compost to get it started, then turned, aerated, watered, and turned again every other day. At one point the pile reached a smoke-steamy 163 degrees. And it worked!
I was so proud of the finished compost I wanted to bake it in some cookies. But guess what? It worked my tail off, and nobody really cared. Most folks just buy it already made. Cheap.
So I backed off, and for a while just kept a passive. side-by-side pair of bins made of half-inch hardware cloth. I simply filled one at a time with whatever I had to compost, with no turning or anything, and dug what I needed out of the other. Back and forth, this constant in-put/output system worked just fine.
I discovered through sheer laziness that there are only two hard rules for composting: Stop throwing that stuff away and pile it up somewhere.
Nowadays I just have a big old-fashion, worm-laden leaf and de-bris pile on one side of my back yard, onto which I simply throw what-ever I have at the time – leaves, faded flowers and veg plants, weeds, kitchen scraps, whatever – and then dig and sift what I need through a hardware cloth screen into a trash can. Whatever isn’t finished composting gets run back through the pile again.
It’s not entirely unattractive, but I could neaten it up with a little fencing, or add an interpretive sign that proclaims “Earthworms at Work.” Instead, the only extra I did was lay heavy plastic underneath to keep tree roots out.
Oh, for those of you who research too much: A lot of overeducated folks will tell you what you should and should not put in a compost pile. Mostly they’ll warn against weeds and meat.
Well, I don’t go along with those fake rules. My garden already has weeds, so why am I trying to keep them out after the fact? No big deal. As for meat, I once put a dead raccoon in mine, covered with enough leaves to avoid unpleasantries, and by the next spring it was composted. Gone completely, except for bones. Just like what would’ve happened in the woods.
The only thing I won’t put in my leaf pile is broken glass. Every-thing else just gets tossed on top, or maybe dug in a little with a shovel I keep handy. That’s it.
Back to those two rules. Forget ‘em. Just do it.
Felder Rushing writes a weekly column for Mississippi newspapers and is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
