The joys of discovering something for free

Last autumn, I found, hauled and shredded leaves from my block to make four large compost bins. I mixed the leaves with coffee grounds and let them sit over winter, mixing several times this spring, and had beautiful compost mulch for nearly all my gardens.

Nearly...

I was so pleased with the resulting compost that I wished I had hauled more leaves home last autumn, as dry leaves that don't contain grasses and weeds are hard to find in the spring and summer.

A treasure of shredded leaves waiting for me to haul away.

The other day while eradicating Canadian thistle in my community garden, I wondered over to our compost pile where I was sure to find some. Indeed, I found the mother of all thistle colonies. While there, I also discovered a beautiful pile of shredded leaves. It must be where the landscapers for the surrounding area dumped them.

I immediately recognized the solution to my lack of leaves problem. Today, while running errands around Madison's east side, I backed my car up to the pile and dug in. The leaves on top were crispy and not very decomposed, but just a few inches into the pile and they were wet, decaying and smelled wonderful. I filled two collapsible containers and the trunk (which I had lined with a tarp).

Passengers, you can't see in the photo, but they are belted in!

I stopped at the two Starbucks that are on my way home from work and one of them paid off with four bags of coffee grounds. Not enough for all the leaves I had collected, but a good start.

Back at home, I filled a compost bin, put down a layer of coffee grounds, then a load and a layer of too fresh horse manure, then a load and coffee grounds. I'll add water (or let it rain, whichever comes first) mix it up a few times and it will be a steaming pile in a few days; and should be beautiful compost to put my beds to sleep with this autumn.

My plan is to repeat leaf and coffee ground collection until all four of my bins are full. This should be enough for autumn mulching. After I empty them this autumn, I'll fill them again with leaves from the block. My ultimate goal is that I don't need to buy hay for mulch any more. I almost made it this year, but ended up buying two bales at the last minute when I ran out of my own compost.

How to get free mulch and help your local waterways at the same time

One of the permaculture principles that I continue to work toward more fully integrating into my garden is to reduce importing energy and materials from outside our property. For the last couple of springs, I have purchased hay bales to use as mulch in the garden. It's locally sourced, and I organize my neighbors to have a large truckload delivered to our block, so it's a fairly efficient and cost-effective way of getting mulch for lots of people.

Still, I've been thinking of how I can use what I have or can get my hands on locally that will serve the same purpose. This weekend I found a great source of mulching material that is nearby and easy to gather. You of course know of the "manna from the sky" that happens in the autumn, as the leaves fall to the ground. However, our backyard doesn't have a lot of trees, and our neighbors leaves mostly fall into their yards.

But as I looked around my street, I noticed that some of my neighbors were piling their leaves on the curb to be collected by the city. I also saw a lot of leaves in the gutters, just waiting for a rain to wash them in the storm sewers and out into our lakes. Here in Madison, we have a "Don't leaf our lakes" campaign to encourage people not to put leaves in the gutters because they add significant source of pollution to our lakes.

So this afternoon in about an hour, I accomplished to wonderful things; I easily collected a lot of leaves that had gathered in the gutters, and for my small part, remove these from the potential of washing into the lakes.

I found it very easy to rake leaves into piles right there in the gutters. Way easier than raking the lawn! Some of the leaves were a little wet, and I had to scrape them off the pavement, but it was a relatively easy task. Then I brought out my trusty tarp, and loaded it up from the piles I made.

I then hauled my leaves into the backyard. The tarp had grommet holes and I put a long nylon rope through several of them on one side. I was able to loop the rope around both my shoulders and just haul them like they were a big, heavy cape behind me.

I dumped them in a corner of our back yard, where I will run over them over with our electric lawnmower, put them into compost bins, add coffee grounds, mix and wait for the magic to happen before using this compost next spring for mulch around all my veggie plants.

Compost bin experiment solves a small problem

Chicken word of the day: Cock-and-bull: a fantastic story that is unbelievable.

Months ago, my friend Angie gave me kraft paper bags of leaves and sticks she collected from her yard this spring. Jay and I also drove by a house in our neighborhood that had leaves in these paper bags and we threw them in the back of my car.

I finally got around to emptying and moving my compost pile last week. I tore open the collection of bagged leaves, and chopped them up with the lawnmower. One of the big advantages of chopping up leaves is they compost much faster than had I left them whole. This pile could be done by the end of autumn. However, the small leaf pieces also fall through the large openings in the sides of the compost bin.

Compost is made up of "green" materials which supply nitrogen, and "brown" materials which provide carbon. Paper is a brown material. So I'm looking at these paper bags and think to myself, "Well, this is brown, why not put it in the compost pile?" Then I got a better idea.

I lined the compost bins with the kraft paper bags. My thought is they will keep the small leaf bits in, and may help keep the pile from drying out. On the other hand, I'm hoping the paper will allow the pile to breathe.

The leaf bits didn't fall out of the bin. Shown here is a layer of coffee grounds that I layered between thick layers of leaf matter. In a couple of weeks I'll turn the pile. I also need to add a few scoops of dirt to inoculate the pile with some good bacteria.