Massive Soil Improvement Using Leaf Mulch

hey this is joe with grow up build and today i'm going to tell you how you can use autumn leaves to greatly improve your soil so every fall when the leaves start to turn colors i get a little excited and it's not necessarily just because it's pretty it's also because i'm about ready to get a huge resource in the form of leaves now people probably think of leaves as using it as a brown material when making compost or piling it up to make leaf mold i've come to use it in a single way which is just to apply it to my gardens directly as mulch and that has shown to be the single best thing i've ever done to improve my soil fertility you know i have suburban backyard horrible soil which you can see on the left which is in my lawn and on the right is actually just out in my garden the color difference is pretty much all just due to the organic matter so in this video we're going to cover what is leaf mulch the benefits some do's and don'ts and then a detailed explanation of what i did last year and what i'm doing this year so let's have a look so leaf mulch is exactly what it sounds like it is just leaves that are piled up in your garden so get leaves put them in there you can shred them or not shred them either way and that's all it is it acts as a mulch in a flower bed or a vegetable garden so for the benefits of leech malts though there's leaf mulch there's about six and the first one is it's going to add a lot of organic matter to your soil and in adding the organic matter to your soil it's going to improve your drainage it'll reduce compaction and the way it's going to happen is something's going to trickle down but really once the worms start eating those leaves in the spring they're going to travel down deeper into your soil reducing compaction and they're going to poop out worm castings essentially and also by doing that they're going to be improving your soil fertility now there is no shortage of university studies documenting how leaves will improve soil fertility our website has a detailed table with the rough percentages you can get of nitrogen or npk for fertilization if you want to see those numbers just google grow it build it leaves and you will have no problem finding that study as well as the other ones that i reference and cite it's really a big boost that you can get in addition to that it's going to improve your water retention organic matter improves water retention and it does it so well and so predictably that they can actually make regression equations that will predict how much water can be held in soil based on the amount of organic matter present and this is they did this 40 years ago and it fit pretty well the next one is leaf mulch will improve mineral availability so tree roots go way deep down into the ground they pull minerals they transfer those up through the tree to the leaves these fall back down and make them available again well when people throw their leaves out you can get that you know those leaves and get those minerals for your garden as well as the other nutrients um next one is a really nice benefit is it reduces weeds when you have a layer of organic matter a thick layer on top of your soil it's going to block sunlight from hitting weed seeds and prevent them from a lot of them from germinating now i still get weeds in my garden but i really only had to weed my garden about two or three times and i mean like you know spending an hour out there weeding um it mainly looked like this all year you know the leaf mulch really did a huge service to me in that i didn't have to pull weeds as much as i had in the past so i was very happy about that and lastly leaf mulch is free you can get leaves for free people throw these out all the time you know trash bags will show up on the street filled with leaves um you can just get them and throw them in your car you can drive around in october november and do it so some do's and don'ts do collect them from the street you know this is a bordering some land that nobody owns in my neighborhood also shred your leaves if you want to increase the time to you know reduce the time to decompose increasing the surface area to volume ratio will make it happen faster basically um some things to avoid is if you're trying to if you till them into your soil they're probably going to rob nitrogen from the surrounding soil that's because dried leaves are a nitrogen sink they're a raw material used in compost also if you have black walnut trees nearby don't take those leaves they have a chemical called juglone in them that is toxic to certain plants we have a complete listing of that at our website if you look grow build it black walnut you can find all that information there and i mean the juggalon will go away over time like you i compost with black walnut shavings myself but uh just be aware of it okay so what did i do last year this is october of 2019 i'm just getting started to putting leaves down but before we do that i want to show you what my soil looks like when you're just digging it into a little bit if you just take a little shovel full you can see that i have a very thin black layer of soil and it is quickly turns orange i know this was sunset when i was doing this so the lighting's not good but um basically this was year three and i had maybe a maybe an eighth of an inch three millimeters six millimeters of black layer on top of my horrible crap suburban backyard and anyone who's watched my grass videos knows that i have bad soil like there's no organic matter but i have a neighbor up the street who has six or eight of these giant maple trees and halfway through the year last year of leave swallowing he said i could have his leaves so i happily took them and i ended up with 35 bags of those black trash bags with leaves in addition to my own and adjacent yards leaves and um i happily applied them i ended up with six to 12 inches of leaves so that's 15 to 30 centimeters and i had that on my garden and that was it i uh did i just you kind of just leave them in place now one observation when you get them off the trees right away it's kind of interesting when they're still pliable and have some moisture they'll start hot composting in place which i didn't expect but i was happy to see it but anyways yeah i just left them so they were there for the winter now i did go out and turn them a couple of times um i really don't think this was necessary i don't plan on doing it this year but i just want to let you know i did do this i just figured mixing it up might help speed things along i but anyways i left them in place and they they kept compressing themselves over time which they will and if i skip ahead to may right after i have planted out my garden um you can see that the leaves are still there but they look a little different and if we actually um zoom into the top layer of soil you can clearly see what the compacted leaves are now they're very compacted very layered up but i still have that thin black layer which is circled in blue versus the actual leaf mulch which is circled in green so that's what it looks like at this point and here's a side-by-side of what the soil looked like in october 2019 versus may so pretty much the same except for the addition of leaves now we're looking at july and they're this is what it looks like there really isn't any uh leaves that are you can i mean you can tell it's leaves but it's not that identifiable and i've got little bits of weeds that pull easily now we're looking at october and the leaves are just you can't tell they're there at all i have two to three inches of basically composted or broken down leaves on top of my bad soil and i'm very happy about it also you can see how crumbly and nice and organic it is and all the white fibrous roots from my surrounding vegetable plants which loved this stuff i really had the best year i've ever had and if we look here the color contrast in wet soil is quite dramatic um you know the proof is in the color here so i showed you a sample from my lawn on the left and my garden on the right i'd like to show you exactly where i took those they're both six inch deep samples i was doing this for my mason jar testing and just to see the difference between the two and i want to point out the color of the liquid the one on the left is the garden and it has black liquid where the one on the right is red which is it could be iron i'm not entirely sure but there's no organic matter that's the point so this is the garden and here is where i'm about to take my soil sample this is about five feet outside the fence and i'm really trying to take shovelfuls that are straight down as best that i can and then in the vegetable garden i'm five feet on the other side of the fence and again i'm trying to take straight down now the thing is is we all know the results here um you know the vegetable garden is going to have several inches of good black soil and three inches of not so good soil um but it's still kind of neat to see just how much difference you actually get but it was when i was doing this testing that i could see such a dramatic color change that i was like wow i really did something good for my vegetables i already knew i had because i had the biggest plants i had ever had that year but this transformation in a single year at no cost was just amazing to me um so what are we doing now well this year i talked to my neighbor before the leaves started to fall and i ended up being able to get all of his leaves which resulted in 59 black trash bags of leaves that were dumped now i did mow a lot of these up not all of them because i'd get them day after day but i did mow quite a few up i found the most efficient way to do this you just dump the leaves down and mulch the leaves in place as long as i get rid of my rocks that i tend to have everywhere but yeah in the end i ended up with basically one foot of leaves now the grating on that is two inches by four inches on the fence so i have 12 inches of leaves or 30 centimeters leaves on the whole garden so this is doubling it if there is an upper limit as to how good of uh or how much leaves you can have maybe i'll find it i don't know so ask in the comments and i'll try to post updates throughout the year if i get reminded to but this is really an awesome thing that you should be doing on your garden of all the soil improvement activities i've done this one had the largest impact in the shortest amount of time in the least cost for sure looking at side-by-side comparisons of what my soil was to what it is today with that big thick layer of organic matter on top is really kind of awesome so about us a little bit we are just a husband and wife of backyard gardeners we just turned a patch of crap suburban soil into a very well producing vegetable garden [Music] we do have a number of other videos that we're going to be putting into a playlist of everything that we've done that you might find useful like making compost testing the soil texture of your yard the drainage of yards see if there's any areas that you can do some improvement but making leaf mulch is something you absolutely should be doing because of it has a huge impact at minimal cost and not that much effort really it's changed the way i look at things because now when i see autumn leaves i don't just see beauty i see a resource that i'm about to tap so again if you have questions ask them in the comments i'll try to answer them thank you guys very much and give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you want to see more of this you

Channel: Growit Buildit

Views: 550,373

Keywords: how to improve soil, how to improve soil cheaply, improve soil, leaf mulch, soil before after, before after soil improvement, leaves, autumn leaves mulch, fall leaves mulch, autumn leaf mulch, fall leaf mulch, shred leaves mulch, shred leaf mulch, how to improve garden soil, increase soil fertility, are leaves good for soil, are leaf good, how to make better soil, better soil, soil improvement, fix soil, cheap soil improvement

Id: kyYpGNZOCwE

Length: 11min 1sec (661 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020