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Mulching instead of raking
Driving a riding mower in reverse over leaves chops them up a bit and windrows the rest. However, we stopped doing that because the chopped version is more difficult to pick up. Now we just rake leaves and needles onto a large tarp (for some reason my wife likes to rake or I'd take a look at the estate rake). I drag the tarp with the tractor to our bush where I excavated a compost pit.
The pit is about 6' x' 15' x 2' I doz it back and mound it up with leaves in the fall and pull soil over the top. Around planting time next spring I turn the compost by dozing it with a box blade, spread it and pull more soil on top. Like DSG I add lime and also use a bit of high nitrogen fertilizer. The pit is still in the spring but it's mostly down to ground level by fall when I doz it back, take out any compost I need before adding more leaves. Soil from any other digging I do also goes on the mound. Usually we empty the kitchen scraps composter into the pit as well. I think the process is going to be nearly self-sustaining, but I may have to add more soil than I dig elsewhere occasionally or the pit may keep getting deeper.
I think that lime speeds the composting action and so does high nitrogen fertilizer unless the compost pile also contains green fertilizer such as clippings. Composting takes both carbon and nitrogen sources and dried leaves alone aren't adequate as a nitrogen source. What ever we're doing it's working. We go from a 4' or 5' layer of mixed soil and leaves when it's turned in the spring to about 2' of black earth in the fall.
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Mulching instead of raking
As an afterthought I'll add that spontaneous combustion is a risk in composting. The size and moisture content of a pile should be considered. I haven't heard if commercial accelerates add to a risk of combustion or not, but it's something to be aware of. In my operation I do add soil to the leaves periodically and go back and forth with the tractor so I get a mix of soil and leaves rather than a thick layer of leaves above ground level.
I remember seeing several large piles of saw dust and chips smoldering away is a large urban park and reported it. The parks people already knew about it and the impression I got was that it wasn't uncommon for the piles to start smoldering before they disposed of them.
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Mulching instead of raking
Jon: I'm reasoning here that anything that speeds composting really means increased bacterial action and that likely means more heat. The first two years I used my pit I didn't add fertilizer or commercial accelerant as I had to my smaller city pits because I wasn't sure how the larger one would act. The first two years, leaves added in the fall weren't completely composted by next fall but I didn't notice any signs of heat. I used a bit of 7-7-7 on the surface this spring after mounding and composting was complete this fall. So I think the fertilizer speeds things a bit.
The piles I saw smoldering in the park were 15' - 20' high. There is a sizable oak forest in the park and the forestry folks must have been managing the forest. Seems like they culled some trees, buzzed up the trunks, chipped the smaller stuff and put the chips and sawdust in several piles with log sections off to the side. I don't think they were composting it. I hadn't seen it before, but it was definitely significant amounts of wood smoke coming out of the piles. I can't remember if there was much rain that summer or not.
My leaf composting isn't anything like the wood chip piles but the park experience caused me to think about what I'm doing with my compost pit in the bush. I have a vague recollection that ensilage in silos has to be managed or there's some potential for fires, but that would go back to my city kid days on the farm so I may not have it right.
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Mulching instead of raking
Jon: Thanks for your comment. The web link is very good, and now I can put numbers to what I was speculating about. I guess the conclusion is that there's little worry as long as a person doesn't get carried away and start beavering away with their composting works.
It's curious the web site didn't mention lime. I always heard that it a combination of lime, nitrogen, soil and water that works best. I'll probably keep using lime because that's what I've always heard and I figure that since I'm using soil that basically from a pine forest, it's probably already acidic to start with.
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