"mmarteen" wrote in message
...
I just finished reading Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman (not that my
expectations are that high here in MN) and he advocates using scraps and
straw to make compost and using leaves to make leaf mold. Leaf mold seems
to be a much more lengthy process from the way he describes it in the
book,
where you have to keep leaves sort of composting by themselves for over a
year.

If I am already going to make compost and I am not running an organic farm
like Coleman, should I try to make leaf mold or just compost some and bag
the rest? Opinions?

Other than chopping up the leaves, is there anything else I can do to make
the process go faster? For example, will a tumbling composter, either
storebought or homemade, make the process go faster just as with compost?

mm

When I lived in zone 3, northern MN, I found composting in a holding area,
even by adding green material, was a slow process. It took a couple of
years. Too cold? G Finally I gave up trying the "normal" way of composting
and found that working leaves directly into the soil where I wanted humus
worked. In the fall I would first till the soil before spreading the chopped
leaves that I collected with the mower on top and till them directly into
the soil. By the following spring most of the leaves were composted unless I
became too enthusiastic and piled them too high in a given area. I turned
sand into great garden soil by doing this. My neighbors were great in
"allowing" me to collect their leaves in the fall. BTW, the leaves I
collected came from paper birch and maples, which decompose far more rapidly
than the oak leaves of my present zone.

John