Composting Leaves Without A Bin: How To

Leaves are one of the main ingredients of a compost heap, kept by many gardeners to furnish soil enriching humus material for their plants.

The collecting of material for a compost pile is a year-around process, but autumn, with its abundance of fallen leaves and garden refuse, is an excellent time to start the accumulation.

There are all kinds of compost piles. Some gardeners make them in pits with brick or concrete sides; some erect a board frame with three sides; some use barrels; but the majority simply make a rectangular pile on top of the ground in a secluded and shaded part of the yard.

Assuming you’d like to do it the easy way named last, here are the fundamentals:

Composting Leaves Without A Bin

1. Make the pile 4 to 6 feet wide, and as long as you have material for.
2. What to put on the pile: grass clippings, manure (animal or poultry), leaves, straw, kitchen garbage (except fats), peat, fine wood ashes. What not to put on it: plant tops that have been diseased; sticks or other brush with stiff canes or woody parts that would prevent the pile from packing down.
3. Spread out and trample a layer of the leafy material 4 inches deep; add a thin layer of soil; add another layer of leaves, trampled; more soil, and so on, ending with soil on top and the pile dished in slightly so it will catch the rain.
4. If you have commercial fertilizer on hand, sprinkle some over each layer as you build the heap, to hasten decaying action and give the pile greater plant food value. Special preparations are on the market for adding to compost to make it decompose faster. Several are nitrogen compounds, and one type actually contains bacteria which go to work on the pile and change it into leaf mold in a matter of months. When you want compost quickly, try one of the these.
5. Unless rain does the job, wet the pile down about once a week until freezing weather stops you.

In about a year’s time–maybe more, maybe less, depending on how you’ve treated the pile–you can begin to draw from it rich leaf mold for fertilizing and mulching your flowers and shrubs. This humus mixed with garden soil performs many services essential to growing plants–it conserves moisture, opens up the soil to more air, makes cold soil warmer and hot soil cooler, and offers ideal conditions for the billions of soil bacteria on which plants depend for life.

Source: Adapted from The WorkBasket, 1952

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