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Talkback: Making leaf mould
Hi James,We get about 3 charity bags a week for old clothes ,So I double them up and fill them with leaves so far I have 6 bags full with more leaves to fall I should have about 8 in all,come the summer I then add them to my compost bins, by this time they have started to break down mixed with glass cuttings they make a good compost mix. Oldchippy.
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We don't have many leaves in our garden but love using leaf mould so I put a request for leaves on our local Freecycle. We now have more bags of leaves than we could ever have collected! So this time next year should have loads of lovely brown, crumbly leaf mould.
hi James i want to know what you get from Glass cuttings and we too get those so called charity bags through the door,and we do same as you,most of these companies are on the fiddle anyway, im in the cemetary on Saturday getting more bags full so good luck all with all that mould
Alan
as long as you dont put the bag of leaves out for the charity!
Saw non-gardening neighbour raking up more leaves today and once again offered disposal in my leaf pile which was eagerly accepted .
I was expecting last years leaves to have rotted down more than they did, they still looked like leaves when put on the veg bed but I needed the boxes for this years leaves. With all the rain we've had they are rotting down quicker placed on the veg bed though than whilst stored.
I too was disappointed last year that my leaf mould still looked like leaves after a year - but I put them on the soil anyway and I soon had "perfect" leaf mould! Our leaves are mainly from silver birch trees. Are these more problematical than others I wonder?
I used to have a leaf store I made from old pallets and this worked well...plus the hedgehogs liked it....and I put my old potting compost bags on the top once they were thoroughly wet. Now the pallets have disintegrated so I put the leaves in the old compost sacks - they are really tough and black inside. A few holes punched in the bottom to stop them getting water-logged - and then I line them up along the back of the elderly greenhouse which has prevented weeds from growing there, and I think provides a bit of insulation to my unheated greenhouse which houses my echeverias over the winter, and pots of bulbs.
Last year I bagged all the leaves up and left them for about 6 months and they started to break down but were still identifiable leaves - then as I built up layers in the compost bin I added some leaves from the bags - by the end of the summer we had lovely compost
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.