Experimenting with Making Leaf Mold

Dec 30, 2011
Susan Morris

Lawn Leaves - agathabrown

Once the basics of making leaf mold are proven in your urban garden or allotment, naturally the next step is to experiment with speed of decomposition.

Three Basics of Making Leaf Mold

1. Collect fallen leaves as and when you can into a bag or bin. Shredding leaves with a lawn mower, if dry, special leaf blower vacuum, if available, or tearing up using your hands in gloves will speed up decomposition.

2. Moisten dry leaves with water to encourage decaying process.

3. The more well rotted the leaf mold becomes, the finer the structure. Riddling is an option for earlier use.

Why Experiment with Making Leaf Mold?

As Celia Brooks Brown writes about perforated black plastic bags, in New Urban Farmer From Plot to Plate: A Year on the Allotment (2010), "they don’t look very attractive, but the result is a free and renewable source of organic matter" (p.175).

Buying and using large heavy duty plastic bags for making leaf mold makes little sense if there is chicken wire to recycle from rabbit proofing the vegetable garden. A chicken wire composting bin is easy to make with four or more corner posts and the wire stretched around the posts. Depending on the verocity of winds in the local area, it may be necessary to cover the chicken wire leaf bin to keep leaf collections secure inside. Many garden centres and tree nurseries will sell jute leaf mold bags. Alternatively it is possibly to knit your own bags for collecting leaves and composting to leaf mold.

Both material leaf mold bags and chicken wire bins are examples of open vessel composting which is accepted to be a quicker approach to decomposition of wet leaves compared to using black bags. Contact between the wet leaves and grass contributes to the faster breaking down of the leaves towards leaf mold. At six months, the leaf mold can be riddled and used as a soil conditioner or mulch. Results are expected to be optimal after twelve months.

Does the Sort of Leaves Used Matter?

Freely available leaves are the best although avoid evergreen leaves, as Diane Millis in The Little Green Book of Gardening: 250 Tips for an Eco Lifestyle (2010) advises against holly, laurel or Leyland cypress and other conifers as they take longer to decay. From experience, sycamore and birch leaves generally have a longer decaying process than apple and plum fruit tree leaves.

In The Organic Garden: Green Gardening for a Healthy Planet (2007) Allan Shepherd states that "In the US it is fairly common practice to go into the streets and kidnap leaves piled up for removal by the council."

Be sure to check out your local regional statutory regulations. In some jurisdictions once the leaves have fallen from trees, the material is not owned by the owner of the tree although, as a courtesy, ask permission if recycling fallen leaves on someone else’s land or path for making your own leaf mold.