raking leaves

I spent a couple of hours this morning raking up leaves in the back garden.  There are two reasons to collect leaves.  One is that they are going to cause damage if they stay where they are, dead smothered patches in the lawn and rotted crowns among the dormant perennials in the borders.  The other reason to rake up leaves is that you want them to make leaf compost.

My raking belongs largely in the second category, because the garden is so exposed that if I don't get around to collecting the leaves they manage to disappear by themselves over the course of a few gales.  Leaf mould is fantastic stuff, though, so I try to round them up while I can and put them in a heap to rot down.  They only need a bit of netting round them to stop the heap drifting, but take a long time to decay completely, so I have two heaps next to each other, a bigger enclosure that I try to fill each autumn and then top up a couple of times as the leaves pack down, and a smaller enclosure into which I shovel the year-old contents of the bigger bin at this time of year before I refill it.

It is a frustratingly low yielding process, as what seems like several cubic metres of leaves eventually decomposes into barely more than two or three barrow loads of compost.  It is lovely compost.  I spread it reverently on the bed along the ditch and tell myself that the snowdrops and cyclamen will love it, though when I run out they have to make do with spent mushroom compost.

There were yellow warnings in place for high winds for today and tomorrow, so I thought I would at least salvage the leaves that were still lying neatly in a pool under the 'Tai-haku' before they were scattered all over the back lawn.  The wild gean has almost finished shedding, but its leaves have mostly blown straight into the wood, where they will do the blubells good but are no use to me.  The little oak tree by the daffodil lawn is generally a good source, but is still hanging on to its leaves, unless tonight's gale brings them down.  The big chestnut trees along the side of the wood have dropped about half their leaves so far, which were lying temptingly in the meadow.  By mid morning I had to go out, so I suggested hopefully to the Systems Administrator that he might like to rake some leaves to help fill the leaf bin, but the SA did not look convinced.  I hope they don't all blow away before I can get back to them.