Leaf mold

Okay, okay.  It cost more than one'd hope to buy compost to cover our newly-converted backyard-slash-budding-permaculture zone.  So when the autumn leaves began to fall, I was a bit loath to just discard them.  Sure, the city picks them up without charge.  But.  But...

All of that organic matter!...from OUR yard!...how can I just give away all of those nutrients?  That's my biomass!  Yet, a matted yard full of soggy leaves doesn't seem a great strategy.

I did some research.  And it turns out that "leaf mold" is pretty great gardening material.  Here's how to make it:

1. Put your leaves in a pile
2. Leave it for two years

That sounds all well and good.  But I'm just not sure that I'm happy with the technique.  If we had 3 acres, I could find an out-of-the-way corner somewhere for said pile.  Given the plot we have to work with, my vote is for containing it a bit.

It turns out that a better solution, from my point of view, isn't a whole lot more work than this.  It takes a roll of chicken wire and a few 2x2s or 2x4s.  There isn't much to it -- all in, less than an hour's work.  It would have been so, so simple to pay a couple bucks for the wood (and would have saved a stop) but I've developed this annoying habit of avoiding the purchase of any new consumer product unless I don't have a reasonable alternative.  That reasonable alternative is the recycled construction materials shop a few blocks west of here.

Anyway, here you go.  Our leaf mold.  Now we just wait, apparently.  Hold on for an update in 2016.