It’s autumn and leaves are starting to change colour here. Soon they’ll be falling and then is the time to rake them all up. Get as many as you can. If you only have a few then a great technique is to empty them on to the lawn and mow them up. Empty the resulting grass/leaf mix into bags and leave to break down. Otherwise pile them into a heap or black bags and leave to rot down. Leaves take a while to break down so it’s not quick but it is a good organic material that’s worth collecting.
You can pile them thickly on the soil as a mulch.
Leafmold is a great soil covering for winter. The worms will pull it down into the soil where it will enrich the soil and create a better soil structure. it’s especially good for next years carrot and parnsip bed. This is because it encourages a very fine tilth which root vegetables need to grow well.
If you can ever find piles of old leaf mould you’ll discover just how amazing the stuff is. It’s like the best compost soil you’ll ever find. It’s great for growing all sorts of vegetables in. I managed to fill a couple of raised beds with it this year and have grown amazing onions, leeks, and spring onions. It’s given me great sized veggies too and they’ve grown better than ones in the ground!

If you are a kind neighbour then you might also find it’s good to rake up neighbours paths and drives if they are covered in leaves. This will provide you with extra leaves to rot down for next year. A quiet word with your other neighbours might get you bags of leaves dropped off.
You can’t have too much leaf mould. It’s fantastic stuff. Apply generously everywhere as a mulch if you have lots of it. Otherwise apply to a few places in a good layer.
You can compost leaves by having a leaf pile, a leaf wire bin, stuffing them in black bin bags, or by chopping with grass and leaving in bin bags again. Any of these techniques can be used – the mixing with grass cuttings with a mower should be the quickest way to something very usable though.

I’d been to see a friend’s back yard and thought about what sort of compost bin she needed.
I hate the thought of weeds going to landfill when they can be recycled on site.

The yard only has small beds and not many weeds as there’s not much soil. It seems silly to have a massive compost bin when there are much neater options.

A very simple method is needed which involves putting the weeds under a sheet of cardboard on one section of bed (about 75 cm wide … or whatever size you can easily get pieces of cardboard…)
Put green weeds under it and then water the cardboard on top and put a layer of leaves/soil on top to hide the cardboard (and put a pot or brick on it to stop it blowing away)
A wormery would be good for just a few weeds and a bit of food waste though.
If you could find a big pot to go on top of the cardboard you don’t need to worry about hiding it. You’ve not got a lot of weeds to need anything more complicated.
You could just put them in a small layer without cardboard but cardboard encourgaes the worms to come up and deal with them quicker.
and stops them regrowing.

National Composting Week is coming up soon! Sunday 6 to Saturday 12 May 2012 is National Composting Week!

So use this as an excuse to get composting!

You can have either a compost heap or a compost bin. A bin is tidier though!

You then have the choice as to have a cold heap or a hot heap? A hot heap is more complicated as you need to save layers of things and build a pile all in one go… Or you could treat yourself to this amazing compost bin called the Hotbin!

GreenFingers have this fantastic compost bin

HotBin Composter £137.99
90 days to homemade compost.
This hotbin can handle virtually all UK domestic food and garden waste and is the size of a wheelie bin. Manufactured from expanded polypropylene making it 100% recyclable it is a 200 litre hot aerobic composting bin that can easily achieve a temperature of 60’C. You can safely compost cooked food waste in this compost bin.

Look out for local composting events – perhaps your council will be giving away compost bins, or having composting lessons?