You are experiencing a common problem and that is lack of nitrogen.

Compost is great for providing every nutrient in reasonable amounts except one, nitrogen.

One *can* make a compost reasonably high in N, but it is not done with leaves and grass and woody stuff, it is done with fatty, protein rich stuff which most avoid in their piles.

Small plants with yellowing leaves screams N deficiency. Add a source of N. Whether it be Miracle Grow (decidedly not organic) or soybean meal (organic, but GMC) or blood meal (organic, but a slaughter house by product) or something else get some N to the plants ASAP and they will do much better.

thyme, leaf mould isnt the same as compost, real leaf mould is an excellent soil amendment but is low in nutrients so you needed to add nutrients to it for the plants. get some composted chicken manure and spread that around your beds and the plants should come good.

Leaf Mold, if not completely digested and worked into the soil will cause the soil bacteria to spend all their time finishing that, just as they would with any other high Carbon material, and no time at all feeding your plants. How long before planting was this "leaf mold" added to your soil? Like manure it should be added at least 6 months before planting.

IME, the most common explanation for your symptoms is high acidity. I think leaf mold can be pretty acid until broken down to the point of humus. In fact, this spring I brought in several truck-loads of composted leaves to one of my gardens: the two beds that I made up with it and planted with lettuce, beets, squash and so forth have done very poorly - slow growth and yellowing; the row of potatoes that I dressed with it is doing fantastic - big healthy plants and lots of tubers. As you probably know, potatoes (and their close cousins tomatoes) tolerate much higher acidity than most other vegetable plants. I thnk there is suffcient N in leaf-compost to produce good crops but the acidity has to be corrected by some method, or reserve it for the taters.

There is certainly enough N in leaves to produce good crops. Pretty much all that my gardens get is a good thick layer of leaves. (They get kitchen scraps too, of course, but we don't produce THAT many kitchen scraps.) I don't "fertilize" or otherwise add other nutrients. I also don't notice any problems with acidity -- indeed, for what it's worth, the potatoes invariably get scab.

However. I don't dig the leaves in. They go on top as mulch. I can imagine that if I dug the leaves in, or made raised beds using leaves, there wouldn't be enough nitrogen until the leaves had finished breaking down. So my recommendation for a short-term fix for you is to add nitrogen -- composted chicken manure, seaweed, pee...

Thanks for all the responses. I added the leaf mold compost about 2 months ago, which probably explains my problem. I imagine much of the soil web (and you should see the size of the earthworm population where I put this stuff!) is busy digesting this stuff, so here's my plan to combat that plus possible high acidity:

Do a soil test -- I've purchased 3 to send to our coop ext office, so I'm going to do them in various beds and see what comes up.

Water with diluted liquid seaweed. (I have a neighbor who keeps cows -- I figure the liquid seaweed would reach the plants quicker, but would i benefit at all from adding well-composted cow manure as a top dressing at this point?)

I hope that next year my garden is so fabulous with all this organic matter broken down in it that it makes up for this year's poor performance. Sigh. And perhaps I'll have a banner crop of carrots, kale, collards, lettuce and other cold season veggies this fall after the effects of this compost have run their course.

Well, that's my plan. I'll do more based on the soil test results -- I'm reluctant to just amend without having a better sense of what's going on. Also I went back to the garden center where I purchased this stuff, and he's going to send the compost itself in for a test so that should help round out this picture. I guess I'll probably end up adding some lime if it's too acidic?

Thanks for all your answers!

"There is certainly enough N in leaves to produce good crops."

fallen leaves and leaf mould are not high in N at all. I use leaves on my beds and although they are great for adding humus they would neve give me a good crop of anything, so if youre getting great results with leaves alone you already have good nutrient levels to begin with or the N is coming from somewhere else.

alfie you said it yourself here:

"I can imagine that if I dug the leaves in, or made raised beds using leaves, there wouldn't be enough nitrogen"

if the leaves were high in nitrogen, they wouldnt need to borrow nitrogen, just like they cant add lots of N to your soil because they dont have it to begin with.

it just needs a good N fert added to it like composted chicken manure

I agree that the leaves aren't high in nitrogen. My point was that they provide ENOUGH nitrogen -- IF you don't dig the leaves in. Because, if the leaves don't provide enough nitrogen, and I've had the garden there for eight years*, and I'm not adding any other major source of nitrogen**, how come my garden is growing :-)?

*Disclaimer: the first year I started the garden with horsie stable straw.

**Disclaimer: I do alternate pole beans and tomatoes, and I grew a few short rows of butter beans and cow peas here and there in the garden, and a few fava beans that the squirrels plant.

It's a question of intensity. Those several small pick-up truck loads of leaf-compost may well represent acres worth of tree leaves, spread over a relatively very small area of my garden. It adds up to quite a lot of N not to mention OM.

Nothing radical being proposed here. Plenty of gardeners have fertilized primarily with leaves and brush. The Nearings when in Vermont, for example.

"-- IF you don't dig the leaves in. "

alfie, whether you dig them in or not doesnt affect how much nitrogen is in the leaves, it only affects how much N it draws from other sources, that's the point the N isnt in dead leaves to begin with.

"Because, if the leaves don't provide enough nitrogen, and I've had the garden there for eight years*, and I'm not adding any other major source of nitrogen**, how come my garden is growing :-)?"

because you probably have good nutrient levels in your soil to begin with. just as in my garden, plants will not flourish on leaves alone, because my native soil is of a type that is naturally very low in nutrients, if I was on a more fertile soil to begin with, I may not need to add anything at all. what you add to your garden largely depends on your soil, most soils arent empty of nutrients to begin with, so you're basing your observations on the belief that your soil was devoid of nutrients from the outset and the only nutrients available are coming from your added leaves and thats very unlikely.

I've read that australian soils, in general, are naturally the most infertile in the world. Not that that has anything to do with the leaf question.......

Regardless of how much N is or isn't in leaf-compost, it's a good soil amendment. In my direct experience, I have seen that it does stimulate plant growth.

"so you're basing your observations on the belief that your soil was devoid of nutrients from the outset and the only nutrients available are coming from your added leaves"

No, I'm not. I'm just saying that the leaves plus my soil provide enough nitrogen, without my having to add anything else. Now, admittedly, I'm not gardening on pure sand, as Pat is, and I'm also not gardening in Australia, as you are. The soil in my area of MD6 is pretty good. But more than 20 cubic meters semi-crushed leaves per year is going to add a lot of nitrogen to my garden, even if the C:N ratio of leaves is high.

Yellow leaves's ?????? Are they at the top growth .. or the bottom??? yellow top=growth is indicative of a iron defiency, while yellow bottoms indicate nitrogen needs.. But, don't forget that wilt disease is everywhere,,, all around you, no matter what part of the country you garden in,... it's there...and will never be eradicated... However you can make your plants more resistant by bumping the "brix" (the sugar content of the plant)... this can be done by ... frankly.. adding sugar to they're diet... un-sulfered mollasses, raw suger, evan un-composted middin's directly to the soil,, and will make the plants resistant to pest attactt... just er're on the side of of anillation, you can alway's add more later

If the optimal ratio of Carbon to Nitrogen is 30:1 when you get your leaves will determine whether there is a good relationship of C to N in them since newly fallen leaves have a C:N ratio of 40:1 while older leaves will have a C:N ratio of 80:1.
What is a soil with "high acidity"? I know that soils can have a low pH, acidic, or a high pH, alkaline, but when I see this "High Acidity" thing I see someone pouring sulfuric acid on their soil. Yeah, I know many horticulturists use that to describe the state a soil is in, but dew horticulturists really know much about the soil since they consider their soil science class to the the most boring part of their studies.

I mean low ph, low enough to be a problem for most veggies. As we most of us know, generally east of the missisippi the ph of soils in their natural (un-gardened) condition is less than 7.0, and usually less than 6.0. In the northeast, less than 5.0 is no surprise. Berries, potatoes and maybe tomatoes will grow at around 5ph but not much else will for food crops. Fresh leaf compost can be pretty acid judging by my anecdotal experience with it, as I outlined earlier. My anecdotal experience also makes it clear that leaf compost does indeed have fertilizer value. So it's likely that the OP's problem is not absence of N but excessively low ph, which is a temporary condition remedied by time and some application of lime or wood-ash in the fall.

Hello, I have a Tonto crepe myrtle and would like to know if I can plant it this time of year? It is getting in the high 30s (38 degrees) in WV where I am at night. Should I add compost to the soil when I plant it? If I cannot plant it now, will it survive in it's own pot indoors until Spring when I can plant it? thank you.

I see you're new and probably unfamiliar with how the forum works. Usually, it's better to start a new thread, than to try to get your questions answered on a thread that isn't related to your questions. You would do that by going to the appropriate forum and scrolling down the list of topics (threads) to the box at the bottom, where you can create your own topic/thread and ask your question.

You're pushing the zone very hard by even planting 'Tonto' in your zone. Listed as a zone 7 plant at the coldest, it's likely it wouldn't make it through a hard winter in your location, though mulching heavily can offer some help in protecting roots. The plant needs a cold rest period (dormancy) to perform well in the subsequent growth cycle, so over-wintering indoors is decidedly less than a good choice. If you decide to go ahead and plant, I would probably keep it outdoors until it goes dormant. Bring it into an unheated garage or bury the entire container against the north side of a heated building until danger of hard freezes has passed, then plant out in a protected spot, if possible. Make sure you monitor its water needs and take steps to prevent the soil from drying completely over winter.

Al