I mow over the leaves under my trees and leave in place, but I collect bagged leaves from the leaf/bagged grass/ branch collection etc public OM dump. I use an electric weedwacker and put the bagged leaves etc in a steel garbage can and use the electric weedwacker to chop up each load and repeat. I also dump some unchopped under trees and add some wood chips on top to keep the leaf/wood cover windproof. It helps the mulch circle less expensive with the leaves being free and then needing less wood chips. I also get free wood chips collecting branches from the dump. I DID have to pay a lot to get the McKessic wood chipper though. I use it quite a bit though with my tree prunings and people dump off lots of branches which I can make free mulch out of.

Well, I finally got around to filling the frames up. Who knows how this will turn out, but...it's a start. :) The native soil had been solarized this summer and was broken up with a digging bar and UCGs and shredded leaves spread over it a few weeks prior to adding the mix. The west bed was filled weekend before last, the east bed last weekend. The mix (per bed) consists of: 4 bags Black Gold "Mushroom Compost" 4 bags Black Gold "Black Kow Compost" 2 bags Robin Hood "Peat Humis" 8 cu ft coarse vermiculite 4 cu ft milled peat moss 20 gallons shredded oak leaves 1/2 cup dolomitic lime spread on native soil before adding mix 1/2 cup dolomitic lime mixed into mix 1 cup Epsoma fertilizer(5-2-2???) mixed into mix Here's a shot of what the mix looks like: An aggravating aspect of this was that some of the ingredients were "too moist" when I bought them at Lowe's and thus resulted in some clumping. I suggest anybody buying ingredients to check for excessive dampness and if found, purchase elsewhere...it would have mixed much more easily if it had been drier. As things dry a bit and the mix is weathered a bit I think the "clods" will break down nicely. Nope, didn't get a soil test done. :o The reasoning behind the dolomitic lime is that 7 years ago a test I had stated the area needed liming. I applied the appropriate amount then, but basically the area has been in grass/sod since about 6 years ago. With the sandy soil historically be acidic in my area I dangerously figured liming would not hurt...especially with the peat in the mix. Below is a link to a series of pictures I took as I mixed the last bed's mix. If you check the photos out look from last to first photo to be in sequence...didn't upload/post in the order I thought it would. :) Basically what the sequence shows is the volume increase of the mix as different ingredients are added. Now...what to plant here in Z8 with temps 80ishF/60ishF, though the next two nights are in the high 30's!!!!...will be camping tomorrow night!!!!. Check this out....predicted low Saturday night is 38F and high Sunday is 81F...a 43-degree spread!!! WOW. But, then back to the 60's and 80's. So...what to plant? :) Ed Here is a link that might be useful: Sequence of filling the beds...view in reverse order :)

Good Morning, Y'all! First I have to say just how well George knows me! (grin) However, after having multiple fires last week, including multiple fire calls on a couple of different days, this week is off to a great start with us only being paged for one minor fire yesterday, and our VFD's response was cancelled before the firefighters left the station. I hope and pray this is a sign about how this week will go because last week was miserable. We need time for our exhausted firefighters to recover. Charles, My answer would be the same as George's, particularly if your native soil currently is low in organic matter and low in biological activity. When native soil is low in organic matter and there is little biological activity, your soil generally lacks the soil-dwelling microbes needed to break down the leaves in any sort of fast or quick method. So, the leaves will just sit there for a while. Maybe 6-8 months or more with little decomposition. Sorry. I'd rather tell you the truth than paint a pretty picture that's not true. I do not know how much nitrogen the leaves would tie up or consume because I know nothing about your native soil, how much nitrogen it contains or how many microbes currently exist in it. This is a really complicated topic. I'll give you an example from my early days here though, and I'll tell you have I've done this over almost two decades. We always composted everything and added the compost, plus purchased amendments to our soil after we first moved here, since organic matter in the soil was nonexistent in the beginning and we didn't have many, if any, soil microbes. I composted huge piles of stuff like a crazy woman and spent days rototilling it into the soil. Once, just to see what would happen, I buried a whole, perfectly intact oak leaf about 4-6" below the soil surface to see what would happen. A year later, that leaf was still there and had not decomposed at all. Six months later, it was still there. After the leaf had been there in the poor soil for two years without decomposing, I pulled it out of the ground and threw it on a compost pile. This was during one extremely dry year followed by one extremely wet year in poor clay that was just in the process of being amended each year to improve it. That soil is great now, but back then, it was not. One thing I learned from that was that intact leaves decompose slowly, and also that I'd never get my soil improved at that rate because I'd never be able to create enough compost in a timely fashion. So, off I went into the woodland..... I 'stole' all the leaf mold (partially decomposed leaves and forest floor litter) I could haul out of the woodland (one wheelbarrow load at a time and working in dense, overgrown woodland filled with greenbrier and underbrush so that movement of any kind was hard) and up the hill to the high ground where the garden sits. I did it all winter, every winter, for quite a few years. Then I heaped all that leaf mold on top of the ground in the garden and let it sit until planting time. The leaf mold was basically just partially (sometimes even mostly) decomposed leaves with some small twigs and similar forest debris mixed in. The great thing about using this stuff scooped up off the woodland floor was that there was a lot of biological activity in the materials as they were full of microbes and my soil improved vastly from that point. For a few years, I rototilled that leaf mold/forest debris into the ground to get it as deeply into the clay as possible. I knew I had to cut my reliance on my Mantis soil cultivator at some point and stop the rototilling because of the way it messes up soil structure, so after about 10 years of rototilling stuff into the soil each winter, I just started piling the leaves on top of the beds and the pathways as mulch, where they did and still do decompose in place. I did chop them/shred them either with a mulching mower, riding mower (with a big grasscatcher) or with my leaf vac. Doing this first makes all the difference in the world. I'd never work oak leaves straight into the soil because the tannic acid they contain keeps them from breaking down quickly. Somewhere along the way, maybe after we'd been here 5 years and I had realized I could not steal leaf mold from the woodland forever (after all, the woodland soil needs to be able to feed and renew itself too), I started gathering autumn leaves instead of leaf mold. I chopped/shredded them and made huge compost piles. The next thing is key to quick success with this. To make the chopped and shredded leaves break down quickly, I mowed the lawn two or three times a week (we overseeded it with annual rye grass every autumn) and added the fresh, nitrogen-rich grass clippings to the compost piles. I was constantly adding new layers to the compost pile. Chop up leaves, spread them on the pile. Mow the rye grass, catching the clippings in the grass catcher, spread a layer of them on top of the leaves....over and over, throughout the autumn, winter and early spring. I tried to alternate thicker layers of brown chopped leaves with thinner layers of fresh grass clippings. Because we tend to stay pretty warm down here in southern OK in winter, the pile stayed hot and decomposed amazingly quickly. Before planting time even would arrive, I'd already have tons and tons of compost to haul into the garden. Sounds great. works great. However, I'm not getting any younger. I was 39 when we moved here and turned 57 last year, so hauling stuff by the wheelbarrow load isn't as easy as it once was. I get tired more quickly, that's for sure. Since the soil had gotten into really good shape, I started skipping the compost pile step (which meant I could largely stop hauling compost into the garden from big piles outside the garden) and just piled layers of autumn leaves mixed with grass clippings onto all the garden beds and pathways as time allowed in winter. I don't wet them or turn them like a standard compost pile. I pile them on and let them decompose in place at their own rate. When it is time to plant, I just rake back the mulch, as needed, to sow seeds or transplant plants and then pat it back down into place. As it decomposes in place, the nutrients and the compost itself works its way down into the soil in multiple ways....through digging done by the gardener, though the tunneling of earthworms and other soil-dwelling creatures, through the natural action of raindrops hitting the surface and washing into the soil and (ha ha) even through the tunneling activity of the voles that I hate so much. I also turn our chickens loose in the garden in the winter and let them dig and scratch around as much as they want and they turn the soil over really well. Pigs do the same thing, but in a more destructive way (and we don't have pigs ourselves), so I settle for the chickens plowing their way through the garden mixing in my decomposing mulch with the soil, and leaving their own little nitrogen deposits there as well. I don't know what you will find works best for you, but the methods described above are what has worked best for me. I have taken things to a new level with some of the newer beds, and have used a modified form of hugelkultur to add big, half-rotted tree limbs and tree limbs under the soil in new beds. As these materials break down, they improve the soil quickly. There are some drawbacks and, for me, living near the river and having heavily forested land, the main drawback is that hugelkultur beds attract rodents and snakes who like to live in them. Because we have so many timber rattlers and copperheads near and around the garden, I have to be really careful to get my hugelkulture ingredients completely buried underground with none of it showed above ground or accessible above ground. To some degree, this helps keep the rodents and snakes out of the hugelkultur beds, but not 100% because the voles will tunnel and then the snakes will go after the voles. I had a new "garden hazard" develop in the fenced front garden during the rainy years of 2015-2016, and this has nothing to do with the oak leaves, leaf mold or grass clippings or compost or anything, but it does relate to how attractive great soil becomes to all kinds of critters. Because the huge, record-setting rainfall in 2015 left our soil incredibly wet and soggy, crawdads moved into the garden, which I didn't really mind. Guess what followed them? Graham's Crayfish Snakes, that's what. After thinking I had seen it all in my garden, suddenly I had a new kind of snake in there, scaring me (only because I just do not like snakes....it isn't like they are venomous or anything), and eating my crawdads. The crawdads and snakes are merely a sign of what has happened with the soil in our garden----it has been restored, is biologically healthy and that makes it attractive to living creatures of all kinds. When your soil reaches the point that seemingly every living creature on your property wants to move into that soil and live there, you'll know you have accomplished your mission of creating great soil. I cannot and will not tell you what to do. You have to find your own path. All I can say is that the one thing that made the biggest difference to our soil was to add organic matter (any and every bit of whatever I could find) to it, year in and year out. You never ever get to a point where the soil is done and you stop adding organic matter, but after a while you get to the point that you can add it from the top down and pretty much become no-till. My methods evolved over time. My garden has been one big, on-going science experiment aimed at fixing the soil and growing a great garden and doing it in the way that will hurt the ecosystem the least. If I wanted to add leaves now for Spring planting, I'd add a nitrogen source mixed in with them and I'd chop them up as small as I can get them. (Our mulching mower blade turns them into tiny pieces.) Your nitrogen source is your choice---if you have any healthy (i.e. not contaminated with herbicide residue) animal manure available, it is a great nitrogen source. So is alfalfa meal or alfalfa cubes. Or rye grass clippings. Use what you have, can find or can scrounge up. Put it on top of the soil if you want or work it into the soil, but if you work it into the soil, be prepared to use supplemental fertilization to make up for any nutrients tied up by the decomposition of the materials you've added to the soil. Don't expect massive improvement in one year. Just keep working on the soil and it will get better and better every year. One year you'll be digging potatoes or onions or something and you'll realize the soil you have then is not at all the same soil you started with. At that point, take a break, pat yourself on the back and sit there for a few minutes and soak up the joy of knowing you've turned crappy old dirt into rich, healthy soil teeming with microbes. Then, keep on keeping on because our hot climate eats up humus/compost/leaf mold at an astonishing rate. In fact, one reason you eventually go no-till even if you didn't start out no-till is because every time you plow or till the soil, you expose your organic matter to oxygen that helps eat it up more quickly. So, in one sense, going no-till allows your compost, humus and leaf mold to feed the soil more effectively and longer because it will break down a little more slowly. I'll never stop piling chopped or shredded leaves on top of my garden beds and pathways. I'll never stop adding grass clippings. This method works best if I add new layers constantly year round and let them decompose in place. If I stop, the soil will revert back to the dense red clay we had in the beginning, and I'm determined that I will not let that happen. Sorry this is so long, but I am very passionate about soil improvement. You cannot go to any bulk supplier and buy a mix of soil, humus and compost that will come close to being the kind of soil you develop slowly over time by enriching your native soil with organic matter. You cannot turn crappy dirt into rich, biologically active soil in one year, but you can and will do it over time. It is important to feed the soil and make it healthy. Healthy soil not only grows huge yields, it grows healthy food that nourishes your body. When you eat fresh food from healthy soil, it contains more nutrients than fresh food from poor soil. I can tell the difference even in the flavor, and so can some of our friends, who insist our tomatoes taste better than theirs even when we grow the same varieties. We all think that the flavor difference is because of our enriched soil. Everything you do in and with your garden starts with the quality of your soil. Nothing else you do matters nearly as much. Good luck and keep us posted on how your soil progresses. Dawn

Check for local sources of a good quality compost and buy it in bulk for all the areas. Barring that search for a local area of well-aged and composed manure. If all else fails you can buy bags of compost, composted manure, mushroom compost, etc. at any of the big box stores for a reasonable choice and amendments such as alfalfa meal, cottonseed meal, greensand, etc. are available from nurseries and farm stores. But before you get too carried away you really need to have a professional soil test done (approx. $12 at your local county ag extension office) to discover exactly what you soil needs and how much. Dave