How to make EZ Leaf Compost and Leaf Mold to SUPERCHARGE your Garden

what's going on grower shades pursue only coming to you live from Jersey because we want to grow food as naturally as possible we want to be smart in the way we're building soil we wanted to go out and take advantage of what some people view as waste and turn them into black gold just because it's in a garbage bag doesn't mean it's garbage let's go in the past I've made some videos about organic matter but they are mostly about using wood chips a number of you mentioned you just can't get wood chips so today we're gonna make a video about leaves one of those resources that almost anybody can get locally they're extremely abundant and when it comes to me and looking at them I think they're an incredible free resource great free soil conditioner great free soil fertilizer if you use it correctly in the garden I also love these so much more than using something like grass clippings because if you use grass clippings locally you really can't trust that they're safe because number up companies and people they spray their lawns with chemical fertilizers and stuff we want to avoid that at all costs that's why I love using these leaves because people really can't spray the trees for the most part so when I was gonna be a lot safer than the grass clippings not to mention super convenient thing is my neighbors they go around they collect all their leaves they bag them for me and leave them on the side of the road so I can collect them and compost them so convenient while using in my garden in other ways one of the amazing things about leaves is pound-for-pound leaves actually have more minerals than manure I know it sounds a little bit crazy but it's true another great thing about these leaves is that they're great for building houmous when you're composting them so what humerus is gonna do when add to the soil is it's gonna build better soil structure meaning you can retain and drain water better which is super important when it comes to the leaves though there's multiple ways we can use them in the garden I have two favorite ways that I like to use them I'm gonna show you both ways today we're gonna be making leaf mold and making leaf compost first we're gonna start with composting the Leafs and in order to do this there's a few things you have to take into account the first one is in order to properly and successfully compost these leaves now we're gonna have to add a little bit of nitrogen because these leaves alone don't contain enough nitrogen within the leaves too for the bacteria to Excel to break it all down so by adding a little bit of nitrogen will really speed this whole process up we'll add a little bit of water too but I'll talk about it more as we progress along first I want to just basically explain the basics of composting so one of cuz the composting what you really need is a good ratio between brown material which is going to be your carbon like the leaves things like this and your green material which is going to be your nitrogen base once so it doesn't have to be green to be a green material just it has to be high in nitrogen coffee grounds here used great additive for nitrogen when you an accomplice Paul here is manure for my own chickens this is one of the best additives to your compost pile it's just so high in minerals so between the leaves and the manure that'd be just the two would be a great thing again though make sure always careful when using manures you only want to make sure you use them if it's a local source place you know where the manures from you know it's safe then we also have some fresh greens here I've got a couple locations on the property here where I just allow chick weed to grow while I continue to allow it to seed in grow a while so I can feed it to my chickens and it grows almost all year round so we're gonna add this has some nitrogen as well when it comes down to it we're gonna go for a ratio of about 5 to 1 5 carbon to 1 nitrogen if you want to speed up the process even more than you could go for two one nitrogen and mix more often same mix about once a week there's also a hot composting process which is called the berkeley method this is when you do about 50 percent carbon 50 percent nitrogen and you could have finished compost in 18 days we're in the winter now and we're not gonna be using this compost till spring so we don't want to rush too much and we don't wanna put more work on ourselves than we have to so we're gonna go for that common five to one carbon nitrogen ratio and then we're gonna mix it only every couple of weeks because we don't need this compost pile to be finished until really April that's when we're gonna be using it so we're gonna let nature do a lot of the work rather than constantly coming out here and mixing it and putting all the labor on ourselves instead of let nature do the work letting the bacteria go to work and do it does best right here is a compost pile I put together about a month ago or so and we're gonna open it and mix it and I'm also going to show you how you would go about if it was starting a brand new compost pile you'll notice one thing here when it comes to composting you need a certain amount of mass you need to be basically at least three feet wide and three feet high to start this one was even higher but it broke down a little bit and compressed so I'm gonna take this apart and then move this same set up in the next location and then start building the compost pile there okay we moved our fencing over to here I've got it set up just half way so I can shovel these leaves and flip them onto the ground here one thing you'll notice is these leaves aren't grinded up and you could grind them up most of times people do but that only really makes sense if you need the compost broke it down faster if you need to compost on really quickly in a couple weeks cutting up those leaves it's gonna initiate the process almost like when you're chewing your food you know you're chewing it and you're pretty digesting it that's kind of what cutting up will do it'll let the bacteria get to it even quicker but again I don't I don't need this for a few months so I don't need to take it to all the time and effort manually to break all this stuff up what I'm going to show you is how I'm gonna build a compost pile if it was brand new so if this was a brand new compost pile the first thing I would do is add something on the ground that's a little kind of course to make it so it's not gonna mat so we can get some worms and everything coming up and have a good airflow so what I want to add is some asparagus these are asparagus plants that I grow in the garden and I tried to get as much as many leaves in there as I could keep the stalks out the reason I want this asparagus in here because it's a dynamic accumulator to this thing puts roots 15 feet down into the ground so by adding different kinds of plants that have during kinds of roots and pull different minerals we're gonna be adding all this into the compost pile ultimately building a better soil when it comes down to it so we're gonna just add layer by layer things as we add a layer we're gonna want to water it down so let me grab the hose here and we'll water this first layer down okay we're gonna order this all down here next we're just gonna add some some more leaves a about six inches or so Leafs gonna throw those to the bottom trying to make sure we keep this shape some of the leaves in here are cut up already because that's how I got them as you can see and they're already starting to compost a little bit which is excellent so a few inches the leaves here making sure we keep that 3x3 you'll notice the other day I went through and put some more green material in there which is good so after we have a nice layer of the brown let's get to water that all in when we're watering this we wanted to make sure it's wet but not super soggy and the water is so important for the bacteria to actually process and do a good job because these bacteria live on the film of the water they're basically aquatic bacteria so if it's not wet you're not going to get that decomposition process we need to be feeding the bacteria they're the one that's gonna expedite this Hope House isn't allowed to go well so I'm gonna add a green layer now have to leave the brown a little slower on there doesn't hurt next another brown and as we're getting to the center of the compost pile more I'll bring you closer when we are you'll see it's already started to break down and this is a hot compost pile if you wanted to speed up the process we would add a little more nitrogen the nitrogen carbon balance is what's gonna help as we get to the center more of this pile you'll notice some of the stuffs more finished but also we have here this is actual finished compost and I put that in for my own compost pile if you remember earlier in the year we made a compost pile and adding finished compost pile or adding finished or almost finished compost to a new compost pile it's gonna activate it and it's gonna bring those bacteria and it's almost like an oculi ting the whole thing with the bacteria so it'll get the process going quicker next we're gonna be adding coffee grounds I got a lot of coffee grounds so I can get them locally so we love adding this to the garden great nitrogen layer to do that and then water it in and if you're smart you don't wanna use your hands the best tool is a is a pitchfork you can see that complices is looking much nicer in there that's where it's cooking up we like to see it's not hot because it cooled off but it's still cooking off I read that compost actually when it comes to some toxins and things that compounds that are that are dangerous what it can do is through that process when it heats up and do the bacteria what can happen is basically those comments that are dangerous it adds carbon to those compounds and basically makes them inert so they're no longer dangerous so when you're doing the hot composting method you can actually get rid of some of the toxins and some of the dangerous stuff that are in your compost pile just make sure you don't add any manures with any anti biotics and stuff in those because I don't think that's gonna get broken down in the composting process as you see we've got some nice manure from the chickens in here everything in layers and then watering in I can see it's already getting some of that black gold in here looking nice but we want to take some stuff in the outside and move it on to where the inside would be few little piece of plastic you're gonna get sometimes for free free leaves but it's okay another layer Green nitrogen and then back to the brown we're just gonna continue the same process that I'm doing just layering with a Lightyear of nitrogen and I'll show you guys what it looks like as we're as we're finishing up but I know I super draw here and I need to add some water we want to make sure we add in some of these new leaves too not too thick that it matched the compost pile though we really want to make sure we're not mad in the compost pile because it needs oxygen to breathe these bacteria not only need water but they need oxygen another layer of some green we're just gonna continue this process green brown green brown and then I'll show you what it looks like when it's all finished it'll be large and in charge I decided that as I was filling this up that I'd like to add some more of my basically finished compost over a year into this one make one big compost pile so open this up this is one we accomplished earlier in the year but I've added some extra you know tomatoes and stuff that that I didn't get two before they were finished for the year so there's gonna be a nice addition to that compost pile that I'm working on but you can see in here this stuff's almost finished go back in the in the beginning of the of the fall when I started working on this it was just all basically tomato plants and stuff now it's almost finished compost a great smell to it so we're gonna make sure we're layering this in as well another thing I wanted to mention is when it comes to your compost pile don't add anything with a lot of oils anything with a lot of fats I don't add any cooked food don't add dairy and if you ain't any meats like that that could bring in some critters so just think about that another thing is if your compost pile is not heating up there's probably a few different things that could be one you might not have enough nitrogen enough greens to mix with that brown material - it may be too wet three it may be too dry and the other one you might not have enough mass again three feet by three feet to the minimum as you can see this thing definitely has the size so if everything is like it should be it'll be cooking up in just a few days and then by the spring we'll have beautiful beautiful soil or beautiful compost to add to our soil let's move over to leaf bolt now this one is different than compost and I think they both have their place one thing leafmold is super super easy to make it happens just basically naturally and another thing is a compost pile this is super high in bacteria so when it comes to your annuals and stuff your green plants they love soil with a high bacteria content on the other hand the leaf mold that's gonna be super high in fungal activity so your woody species your trees they love a fungal dominated soil so that's why making weak mold is a great addition to just making it a regular compost pile so one way to do it is the simplest way to do is you can take a bag of leaves like this is here and the best way to do it would be to crumple all the leaves up you want the least to be tiny and small but you can do it with whole leaves like you're just gonna take longer so you want the Crumpler leaves up like we have here then just take a pitchfork and put a bunch of air holes in it because we need to make sure that there's enough oxygen and everything for the fungus to survive and the other microorganisms put a bunch of holes in them to the other side a bunch of holes in here we don't want the water sitting and no oxygen getting in then the water will go anaerobic which means without oxygen we need aerobic with oxygen so we've got the holes in there so it can breathe it's already pretty wet in there and this has some green so you're probably gonna want to get one with mostly mostly leaves but this will still work now we're gonna wet it down we've got the holes in so it won't be too soaked and then we would just tie it back up and then leave this in shady locations because we don't want to get too much sunlight on it we don't want it drying out what's gonna happen is the fungus is naturally gonna come in here start breaking it down the same thing that happens in a forest when you want to tree anywhere any of the trees that deciduous one to drop the leaves to the ground they don't get mixed into the soil or anything they lay on the ground as a mulch and create a perfect scenario for that fungal fungus to come in creating the mycorrhizal Association and just establishing it throughout the whole forest now this is a simple way to do it you could also just take some leaves stack them on like a board or even some concrete and then put them in a dark spot same thing wet it down a little bit if you use whole leaves like I didn't hear it could take like two years to create that leaf mold maybe even three if you dice them up really small leave them in a dark space it'll only take a year essentially for you to get that leaf mold a little slow of a process but a great thing to do you're gonna plant it for the future when it comes to successful gardening planning is the huge part of it now the third way that you can use leaves near garden is if you use them as a mulch this isn't something I necessarily suggest one thing though if you do use them as a mulch it is dier important that you dice them up that you cut them up very small because if you have big leaves like this and using it as a mulch these will map the whole ground out making oxygen not accessible to the roots creating an anaerobic condition and also water won't be able to get into there so no water no oxygen no good plants that's right Aang sure people sometimes like to tell the diced up leaves into the soil not something I suggest either it's not going to be detrimental to your soil but again in order to break down this carbon we need some nitrogen so we don't want to tie any nitrogen up in the soil the best way to do it in my opinion you can do a light dusting of diced up leaves on top as a small mulch not too thick but when it comes down to it compost everything because bringing in our compost the finished compost whether it's vermicompost or hot compost like this it can't be the healthiest beer garden in my opinion nothing beats it nothing tops it work with nature let it do the work don't break your back that's a video gross thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed I hope you got something out of it the compost pile came out fantastic I got pretty dang dirty but I had a lot of fun out here and building a compost pile something like this I have to do it because at this time of the year when a lot of stuff isn't growing I only have my small hoop houses I got to be out here on the nice days I got to get my hands dirty I got to be investing in the garden somehow so I encourage you to get out there do the same thing take advantage of these nice days get something done if you enjoyed the video hit the like button hit the subscribe button share with your friends don't forget to check out the merch down-low tuck and James way back at you with another video real soon we [Music]

Channel: The Gardening Channel With James Prigioni

Views: 549,326

Rating: 4.9493346 out of 5

Keywords: compost, leaf compost, leaf mold, garden, gardening, organic, organic garden, permaculture, james prigioni, david dobrik, logan paul

Id: nlzq8qzE0cE

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 12 2020