Primitive Leaf Compost Heap

The annual ceremony was replete with the usual assortment of suburban pagentries. Here in the northeast, the first weekend after all of the foliage have fallen is the weekend of the great gathering....the great leaf gathering that is. Armed with leaf-blowers, lawn-mowers, and an arsenal of rakes, the neighborhood happily proceeded to do away with kilo-tons of fallen leaves. Our entire block ringed with the sound of humming machinery, gossipy chattering, and radio broadcasts of the latest football game. As the day wore away, every house around us accumlated dozens of huge black bags, stuffed to the brim with leaves.

Obviously, tremendous amounts of effort would be spent by all parties, and a great sense of accomplishment is felt at the end. After all, the lawns are no longer marred by heaps of unsightly brown leaves. But what exactly are we doing every year? Well, we're extracting fine organic compost from our properties at great cost, and having them shipped away to be burnt at an even greater cost. Knowing this, I decided to try something different this year. After reading a few chapters from the Rodale's book of composting, I decided to create my own leaf compost mounds. Compost mounds works by the same basic principles as my existing hot compost bins. The mounds are usually vastly larger than bin-based compost heaps. They are uncovered year-around and uses the natural process of decay. The mounds utilize the slower method of cool composting versus the rapid hot-compost method of the bins. Hot composting involves the injection of water and baterial laden animal wastes into a ventiliated humus-rich compost heap. It also involves periodic rotation of the compost layers either through manual labor or through biological organisms(worms, centipedes). With the cool-compost method, none of that effort is required, you just gather the biological materials into a pile, water it, and leave it there. The catch is that cool-composting takes four times as long as hot-composting. So the compost mounds that I set down now, will produce the black compost that I need by the spring of 2008.

Books and theories aside, building the actual mounds were incredibly labor-intensive. Firstly, about 200lbs of leaves were manually gathered into a huge centralized pile. A leaf-mold was used to compress sheaves of foliage into dense layered leaf-packs. Hundres of such leaf-layers were manually constructed. Then another 100lbs of dirt and brush were gathered with the handy shovel and brush-clipper. Then the process of applying a layer of dirt, a thick layer of compressed leaves and a layer of brush were repeated 10 times for each mound. The dirt served to weigh the leaves down, while the brush provided the ventilation structure to let in oxygen and let out the bacterial-processed methane. After the construction of a mound, about 10 gallons of water was poured upon it to fix it's structure and kick-start the decomposition process. I opted to not use any petro-powered machinery for this task. And obviously, I suffered greatly due to that decision. By saturday evening, my entire back felt like a single burning mass of cramped muscles. By the time I finished everything this evening, my entire body was stiff with pain.

After all is said and done, however, I had constructed 4 huge compost mounds, enough compost generation capacity to power a garden 20 times my current plot's size. These compost mounds would be renewable, since every year I would need to only take the processed compost from the mounds, and add in the year's new fallen leaves as replenishment. A garden that uses the entire output capacity of these mounds plus my hot compost bins should be able to produce some 50% of a person's minimum diet. Thus with the completion of the compost mounds, I've taken one giant, joint-stiffening, muscle-cramping leap towards self-sufficiency.