How to make mulch from fallen leaves
The leaves are falling, which means it’s time to start raking and figuring out what to do with them. This year, try turning fallen leaves into mulch for your garden!
Below is an excerpt Will Bonsall’s necessary guide to radical, self-sufficient gardening By Will Bonsall. It has been adapted for exploit on the Internet.
Photos courtesy of Will Bonsall unless otherwise noted.
Making mulch from fallen leaves
For those who question the fertilizing power of tree leaves, let me share a few anecdotes. Although I have many acres of hardwood from which to collect leaves, I usually prefer to transport them from the town of Farmington, 7 miles away. I’m doing the people of Farmington a favor by getting them out (the city used to do that but stopped doing it), and besides, they’re already scattered in piles, relatively free of twigs and branches.
Of course, I always ask the owner if I can take them, even if the answer is something like: “What! Is the Pope Catholic?” At one house on a shady side street, I asked the owner, an older woman with a charming Austrian accent, and she politely replied, “No, I want them myself.” Intrigued, I asked why and she replied: “I need them for my garden.”
Maximum exploit of fallen leaves
The leaf dump holds the incoming loads until I have time to shred them.
Delighted, I kept searching. She, having no known ideological views on the subject, relied solely on maple leaves because that was what she had – the shade-free part of her yard was entirely taken up by her garden, so there was little lawn to provide mown grass, and she had no access to manure.
It had no formal shredding or composting system; she only said: “I think about them from time to time.” This has been her “system” for years, and the hard-feeding cabbages and leeks I saw were testament to her success. A huge pile of leaves in her yard was waiting to be turned into next year’s sauerkraut!
Stories behind the fallen leaves
Story Two: I once convinced Farmington’s street commissioner that they should take their curbside leaves to me rather than to the city landfill. Yes, he hastened to agree, it made sense to everyone. The first two truckloads ended up in my leaf dump and I congratulated myself that from then on I would just wait for my annual windfall.
They didn’t show up in a year, so I asked the street commissioner what’s the deal? It turns out that they are needed at the landfill. Do you need them? I repeated stupidly. Ayuh, looks like they need them to neat the horse stables at the amusement park. Oh, I say consciously, it’s to balance the excess nitrogen in the fertilizer.
Well, not really, he corrects me; rather, it’s all that sawdust bedding that keeps the piles icy, despite the doo-doo pony. What! They exploit “my” leaves to heat ice hockey so it’s well composted? And does he do it? Yes, he assured the commissioner, with no intended irony, it runs silky as hell. Now understand, this good man wasn’t vegan, wasn’t interested in ecology or sustainability – for all I know, he might have been a Republican – but don’t try to tell him that leaves lack nitrogen.
Shredding fallen leaves
Most uses of leaves require shredding, and this requires some type of shredder. In my case, I have an Amerind-MacKissick chipper/shredder designed to work as an attachment to my 12-horsepower Gravely walking tractor, but the chipper/shredder can be powered by any other PTO source or can be purchased with its own, independent engine.
For brush shredding you really need 12 horsepower to accomplish anything, but for leaf shredding a lighter power source may be quite sufficient. The advantage of mounting this shredder on something is that it is easier to move – just moving any distance is a hassle.
Shredding leaves is worth the effort because the shreds won’t be scattered around the garden or crumpled in the compost bin. Photo courtesy of Yaicha Cowell-Sarofeen
Choosing a shredder
By the way, my Gravely is a great machine, which is probably why they don’t make Gravelys anymore. Since such walking tractors have several replaceable attachments (mowers, snow blowers, tillers and others), there is no need to have several engines, each of which requires maintenance.
On the other hand, this means that if one tractor is disabled, you cannot do any of these jobs. Changing attachments is rather a minor inconvenience and should not burden this option too much.
Shredding crops and leaves
The safety grid on my shredder/grinder won’t allow anything smaller than 3⁄4 inch (1.9 cm), thanks to which the product has a very uniform consistency, perfect for application. I just walk along the paths with a huge rubber barrel full of shreds on my shoulder and exploit my free hand to create a blizzard of confetti from the leaves above the beds.
Crop plants are usually a few inches lofty, and the lint falls and arranges itself nicely around the plants, creating a tight and effective mulch with minimal effort. Therefore, it is significant that they are consistently silky – like confetti: so that no clumps of whole leaves smother the crop. Additionally, shredded leaves hold up in the wind much better than whole leaves, especially when they get damp and form a tight “felt”.
Why destroy fallen leaves?
Another reason for shredding leaves is twigs. Although I remove the larger branches separately, most of the leaves have many petite twigs that are a pain to pull out, but I don’t want them to remain whole. This is especially a problem with leaves collected in the forest or from lawns with huge, senior trees (those that have the deepest roots and, therefore, better trace mineral content). Once passed through a shredder, they turn into harmless little shavings that don’t interfere with anything, although you may need to break off longer twigs first so they don’t block the gutter.
If I exploit partially damp leaves they will clog the grate, but if I remove the grate they will come out too quickly, only half shredded. Shredded half is fine as long as I can pass it through again, resulting in a confetti-like product, though not as uniform. For mulching paths and wider-spacing crops and for making compost, this is quite satisfactory. (Remember that once the grate is removed, there is nothing between you and the spinning hammer mills, so stand back.)
Collecting and storing fallen leaves
This rainproof container holds 2 tons (1.8 tons) of shredded, droughty leaves.
I need to collect as much confetti as possible while they are crispy and droughty, so I rush to shred them as quickly as they appear and pack them into a huge (8 × 10 × 4 ft or 2.4 × 3.0 × 1.2 m) covered plank container that holds about 2 tons. If I really have a lot of confetti, I can put them in feed bags and cover them with a tarp to keep out the rain and snow. I exploit a lot of them, stacked under the outside basement door for insulation during the winter.
Other ways to destroy fallen leaves
A chopper/shredder with the appropriate power is the best way to shred leaves, but it is not the only way. My father used to collect leaves at the garage door and repeatedly run the push mower over the pile, mixing them up between passes. Cousin Tom piles it into a long, very deep pile (3 feet or 0.9 m) and repeatedly plows through it with a tiller, scooping it up again when it spreads out.
And of course, we all know the most effective way to shred leaves: you gather them all in a huge pile in the middle of the lawn and tell your children and all the neighborhood children, “Stay away from this.” Within a few hours the pile will be reduced to particles. (To speed up the process, you can hang a used car tire from a branch above your head.)
Shredding fallen leaves: consistency is key
The problem with all these alternatives is the lack of consistency; some will be crushed into powder while some huge pieces remain. This is not a substantial problem for some applications (e.g. compost), but when mulching crops that are close together, including grains, raw chips are more challenging to apply. For mulching larger crops such as cabbages and tomatoes, and for paths, the more primitive lint produced by a lawn mower works well.
It often happens that I have more leaves than I can shred immediately. When I run out of time, I also store whole leaves loose in a closed hex wire (aka chicken wire) leaf container, which I cover with a well-balanced tarp. The leaves stay pretty droughty until I can chop them up next spring or summer.
During this time, the bottom layer will be slightly damp due to moisture being drained from the ground. Sometimes if I run out of confetti next spring I simply spread the damp leaves out on a tarp to droughty again for a few hours and then shredded them, although I usually just exploit the crude method of double shredding without the grate installed.
Fallen leaves: to destroy or not to destroy?
Some degree of shredding is necessary when composting leaves, as whole leaves tend to form a damp mat that will take forever to decompose. In fact, that’s what got me into shredding: since I could only exploit lean layers of whole leaves in my compost pile, I always ended up using much less than I wanted in proportion to hay and other things.
Once shredded, the leaves can be the main ingredient in my pile, which is totally in line with my obsession with eco-efficiency. Indeed, apart from leaves and brush, my composting of corn stalks, sunflower and amaranth would be very challenging without shredding them first. By reducing the volume and exposing more surface area of these materials, I significantly augment the rate of decomposition and the biological heat that ensures an excellent end product.