Garden Preparation this Winter
Today, we were blessed with some composted leaves that are over a year old! Most of the time I get deals like this they come with extra work, like loading it yourself or raking someones yard. Neither of which our family minds but today we just had to sit back and watch them load it into our truck with a backhoe. It was a cold day so you could see the steam coming out of the compost as it was being loaded. I would have thought after 1 year it would be cool but they never turn the leaves, pine needles or grass clippings over unless they get an abundance of the material and they need to move it to a larger area. So it slowly breaks down but as you can see from the picture it is some great compost!
Once home I simply backed the truck into the garden and started unloading the "black gold"! I couldn't believe how good it looked and it smelled fresh! Yes I said fresh, I think composted manure smells fresh also so maybe I'm different? Many of you that read this will probably agree that composted material has a great and fresh smell!!
This year I am a little behind in getting our garden closest to the house covered since I was waiting for cold weather to harvest the carrots. Spring planting is right around the corner so I was happy to get this great material. My plan is to get 2 more loads this week and finish up 1 garden area. Next garden area is 6-7 times the size so this one takes a little more material to cover it. We will cover that in another post!
Thanks for reading, commenting, re-steeming, and upvoting!
I've never found leaves to heat up, were there a lot of grass clippings in the mix?
Very few actually, some pine needles but mostly (80%) appeared to be leaves.
What lovely stuff, leaf mould! We are in the process of making BIG bunches of leaf mould. I have a bunch of composting areas around the homestead with leaves in them just helping them decompose. Hopefully, the day is not long off where we will be in your position and putting this beautiful stuff on our garden (that does not yet exist).
Based on your acorn flour posts you all must have plenty of leaves available! I am planning to past an add on Craigslist asking for free hay for the garden. It has worked in years past and has been a great blessing to our plants and ground!!
Gardening never takes a day off...it may slow down some but as you have shown here even in January there is still prep work to be done before anything can be planted!
We agree, it can slow down but it seems like we are constantly adding new things which is great! I am glad everyone wants to change and move to the next step. It sounds like you have been gardening for years also?