Rob Schwartz

Thank you for all the tips. I think chopping them into small pieces and using them as filler material for the road will suit my needs perfectly.

I am in the planning stage of building a permanent road on my homestead. Because of the slope of the land, washout is an issue and geo grid seemed like the solution, unfortunately the price of the grid made that untenable.  I recently stumbled upon someone using old tires with the sidewalls cut off as the grid base for a road. This seems like a perfect solution for my situation but it will leave me with hundreds of rubber circles to deal with.

Does anyone have any ideas for reusing the sidewall pieces for anything useful? I would prefer not to just throw them back in the garbage to end up in a landfill.

Anne Miller wrote:

What is wrong with leaving the leaves on the ground to let Mother Nature make more leaf mold?

I have 40 acres of oak leaves that Mother Nature takes care of for me.

To use the land for other purposes. I have buildings to erect, gardens to plant, animals to feed, etc. Plus, I've been told that leaf mold is good for breaking down clay heavy soil and it only takes me 6-10 inches of digging before I hit solid clay. I want to use to leaf mold to improve specific areas of the land more quickly.

Anne Miller wrote:With 10 acres buried in leaves, Mother Nature has already made tons of leaf mold for you.

Find some shady spots where there is no other vegetation growing.

Scrap back just the leaves.  See all the rich leaf mold laying there waiting to be scoped up and used in the garden?

You are absolutely correct! I have found tons of it in areas that haven't been touched it 10 to 20 years minimum. I have been mixing some into each layer of the pile, in hopes the fungus spreads faster.

The issue I'm trying to solve is what to do with all these leaves! Obviously I can just burn them, but if I can produce something more useful than ash, that would be great. I already have more ash than I know what to with from burning random wood, briar, and other vines.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:I think that if your pile is heating up and smells like something more bioactive than musty moldy leaves, you are succeeding brilliantly!

Excellent! As you might have seen behind my container, I have a near endless supply of leaves. While I believe my current method may produce the fastest results, it is extremely time consuming. If I continue this way I will be mulching and moving leaves year around.

I am looking to build a few 3 sided containers around the property that I can just blow the leaves into, stomp them down a little bit and let nature do its thing.

If anyone has experience or advice for producing leaf mold at scale, without making it a full time job, I would be grateful!

Here is a more recent picture of the pile.

john mcginnis wrote:

Rusty Hopewell wrote:First post on this news gem of a forum. Happy to have stumbled upon it.

Very ingenious. Kudos.

Having acreage I have to scale up. So..... I use garage doors! The metal kind that are on rollers that run on tracks. Talk to folks in the biz, many times that will give them away just to avoid the hassle of the dump. I use the original hinges to keep 2 panels as a 'set', which with a little retooling fold onto each other for easy movement. Use 1/8" rebar to stake them. Four sets and I have a box 36" high by 12x12'. Build a pyramid 6' high with leaves capped with some birdnetting. A huge amount of mould.

I have also used the doors as a temporary pen for chickens.

Do you have any pictures of your set-up? I have 10 acres of forest burried in leaves and am looking for ways to efficently mold them. How many of these boxes do you have? Can you quantify, approximately, what each one holds?

I started my first leaf mold pile. I mulched leaves with the lawn mower and started layering them, wetting each layer as I went. Its been going for 4-5 weeks. I know even with mulching down the leaves, the entire process may take 9-12 months.

I was transplanting a couple of saplings and decided to steal some leaves from the bottom of my pile to mulch around the saplings.

When I dug down towards the bottom, I noticed a manure smell. The pile was slightly warm, maybe 75-80F.

Does anyone know if the smell is normal? I'm hoping to get ahead of any potential problems.