"msterspy" wrote in message
...
I live in the Boston area and I have about 5 oak trees and two pines.
I get a lot of leaves and I recently contracted a guy to move all of
the leaves to the rear corner of the yard. $300 for probably 1/2 day
work. Everything is expensive in the Boston area. Anyway, it would be
very costly to have the leaves carted off to the dump. The yard slopes
away form the house and it would be cost a lot more to remove the
pile.
I would like to add something like lime to speed up the decompostion.
Is this a good plan? Is there any other beter way to speed up the
proceess. There will be a huge pile of leaves and it builds up every
year.


Unless he's renting some fairly pricy equipment, it's probably cheaper to
hire a plumber or electrician to do that work.
$300 / 4hrs = $75/hr
I couldn't see paying more then $15/hr for this kind of work. You can add
nitrogen to speed up the decomposition, a 50 lb bag of blood meal out in
California is about $30. Sprinkle a bit on the pile as you add new leaves.

If you're paying someone $300 to pile up the leaves, I can't help but wonder
what you intend to do with the compost afterwards, which will be a mound
about 1/4 - 1/3 the size of the original pile. Somehow you'll need to spread
that back out.

-S