Leaf Mold
The role of compost as an essential ingredient in kitchen gardening (growing food on your property for household use) is now well-known, and you might be adding compost to your garden about now.
Compost is usually talked about as low-key and low-maintenance. The hot take is that, unless you have large amounts of vegetable matter or livestock waste to process, composting can be as simple as piling organic materials and letting them rot down on their own.
In practice, compositing may involve more thought and work. There’s the matter of getting right the ratio of “browns” (carbon-rich waste) to “greens” (nitrogen-rich waste) in your pile. Then there’s regulating the pile’s moisture level, important to the rate of decay and the finished compost’s texture. And, since kitchen and garden scraps take time to break down, they meanwhile offer food to non-native Norway rats and deer mice, a vector for hanta virus. Nevertheless, composting is one of the best things you can do to promote garden health and lower your waste stream in the process.
If you really want a much easier-to-make form of compost, though, it’s hard to beat leaf mold, a compost made exclusively from the leaves of deciduous trees and other plants (and which, by the way, does not harbor any mold, despite its name).
While leaf mold is mostly cellulose and lignin and therefore doesn’t contain as many plant nutrients as other composts do, it’s got a lot going for it. Soil organisms love to feed on leaf mold, and their populations go up when it’s applied to soil. Leaf mold helps soil develop good structure, aiding in tilth production. It’s also excellent for water retention, a serious consideration as Island summers grow hotter and drier.
Maybe best of all, in this form of composting you can avoid the whole pile-management part of standard composting. To produce leaf mold, just gather leaves in the fall, run them over with a bush hog or lawnmower, and spread the result directly on your garden. The chopped-up leaves will compost in place, eventually producing leaf mold. It’s compost right where you need it, no hauling or spreading necessary.
Not only will you be making compost about as easily as possible this way; you’ll also be initiating a very important practice neglected by most gardeners: winter mulching. Winter mulches like this one made of leaves protect soil nutrients from being leached out by winter rains, smother any leftover summer weeds, and prevent germination of unwanted winter plants. The leaves’ long decay rate guarantees this kind of mulch lasts for months.
By about right now on the gardening calendar, the leaf mulch has decomposed into leaf mold and can be lightly tilled or scratched into the upper layer of the soil, enriching that layer while leaving the soil’s overall structure undisturbed. If you’re still building healthy soil because your garden is newer and sits on some of the Island’s notoriously poor soils, a deeper tilling might be warranted to incorporate the leaf mold into lower soil layers.
