It’s time to think about making leaf mould again with this year’s fallen leaves.

I thought I’d show you what happened to last year’s drumful. A year ago, the drum was packed to the brim with shredded, fallen leaves, moistened and left alone in a shady place under the Mandarin tree. You can find out how I prepared the leaves last year in this post.

The pic above shows the drum with lots of holes in it that ‘processes’ the leaf mould. It’s really just to contain the leaves and let air and moisture and little critters get into the system.

You can see in the next pic that the volume reduced by more than half through microbial, fungal and insect activity.

Now we’re seeing some action! This is the top few centimetres, the following picture is the middle of the pile and the last pic is the super fine, finished stuff towards the bottom.

Next year, I’m thinking of turning the contents of the drum after 6 months or so to see if that will make the mould more consistent throughout the drum. I don’t think I’ll pull it all out and mix it, rather, I’ll just invert the drum. That’ll save some work! I’ll make a second drum too that will sit for 2 years, some folks swear by that. While I’m in a mood for experimenting, I’m thinking of making a compost tea out of some of this year’s and try it in the bioponics.

In the past, I’ve shredded all of the garden leaves but this year, I will leave a lot of them because, over the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot about the insect biodiversity in the garden and have discovered that many of the little critters lay eggs on the fallen leaves or overwinter in, on or under them and the dead weeds. Raking them up and shredding them has probably killed off a good many bugs and now I know what I know, we should be able to get a headstart on the predator/prey cycle as the weather warms. Natural pest control at its finest! I wrote a post about it here.