A Guide to Homemade Leaf Mold: Nature's Free Compost

Imagine mulch with no smells and no work! Here’s how to make leaf mold. It’s easy, green, and free. Leaves from your own yard make the best leaf mold possible.

A wooden bin filled with autumn leaves breaking down to become leaf mold.

As I put my gardens to bed for the winter, I like to tuck them in with a thick leaf mold blanket.

What is Leaf Mold?

Leaf mold is basically a compost made entirely of broken-down leaves. One difference between leaf mold and compost is the fact that compost involves the bacterial breakdown and leaf mold involves fungal breakdown. Where compost is hot and breaks down quickly, leaf mold is cool, slow to break down, and well worth the wait.

The best leaves to use for leaf mold are small types from oak, beech, hornbeam, lime, and hazel trees, all of which break down easily. You don’t need to be too choosey about your leaves, though. All leaves and conifer needles will eventually break down into leaf mold.

The Benefits of Leaf Mold

Leaf mold will perform in your garden as a mulch, compost, and soil conditioner. If you have ever had your soil tested, I am sure the results indicated you need more organic matter. It says organic material levels are low for all of us.

Think about what the ground is like in a deep forest where nature adds a nice layer of leaf mold every autumn. The ground is soft and airy thanks to the leaf decomposition. It has an amazing richness to it. It’s a gorgeous dark brown and loaded with nutrients. 99.9% of us do not have soil like that. 99.8% of us never will, but using leaf mold will get us a bit closer.

A gray tiger cat hiding in a pile of leaves. — Peek-a-boo!

As I said before, making leaf mold compost isn’t a quick process. It takes time, but the results are worth the wait. If you didn’t start making it last year, you won’t be using it on your beds this year, but you can get ready for next year. And did I mention it’s free?

What is the NPK of leaf mulch?

NPK values are not particularly high, as it’s primarily a soil conditioner, and obviously, the leaf content changes the values, but on average…

NUTRIENT CONCENTRATIONS IN MUNICIPAL LEAVES (DRY WEIGHT BASIS)

Carbon 36-52%
Nitrogen .66-1.62%
Phosphorus .02-.29%
Potassium .09-.88%
Calcium .13-3.04%
Magnesium .02-.46%
Copper 2.8-31.5%

The leaves offer a significant amount of nutrients for the soil, but not all are immediately available after application. However, as they break down, they will eventually release their nutrients, and it’s best to think of using leaves as a long-term fertility solution.

How to Make Leaf Mold at Home

A little time and a lot of leaves are all you really need to make this free soil enhancement. This video from Fine Gardening will show you how simple it is to get started.

How to Make Leaf Mold by Fine Gardening

If aesthetics are important to you and you don’t want a huge leaf pile in your yard, create “bins” of field fencing. A 3-bin system works well for me. I always have one I’m using, one that’s breaking down, and one to put fresh leaves and plant debris in.

A word of caution in your leaf collecting: People are more than happy to give away their leaves. Some may actually pay for you to rake them and take them away. Be sure that the source of the leaves does not use pesticides or fertilizers on their property.

Walnut, eucalyptus, and camphor laurel leaves may inhibit plant growth. These leaves (if you have a lot of them) should be composted instead of used in a leaf mold. Traditional compost piles/bins get hot enough to break down these inhibitors.

Toadstools growing out of the forest floor. — Thanks to naturally intensive plantings and yearly additions of organic mulch, the forest floor develops incredibly fertile soil.

How I Use This Free Mulch in My Gardens

I use leaf mold from time to time in my vegetable garden, both as a soil amendment and as a mulch, but I’m excited to share where I use it so that it shines: my perennial beds. I find it so hard to amend the soil in my perennial beds.

So many amendments need to be worked into the soil, but you can’t really dig in around tight clusters of perennials. I also have bulbs scattered throughout all of my perennial beds. These bulbs are the first sign that spring is here when they peek up through the snow. I would hate to unknowingly damage them.

As the growing season is coming to a close, I head out to the gardens with clippers in hand. Some perennials perform best if cut to the ground, others need light pruning at the end of the season, and some are fine just as they are. I go through and do all my pruning at one time. When I’m finished, I head out and grab a couple of buckets of leaf mold. I like to do a nice 2-3″ layer along the entire bed.

The self-seeded annuals and the bulbs can push right through in the spring, but it keeps the soil rich and keeps the weeds at bay. If I have a tender plant (like my coleus that shouldn’t over-winter in my area), I’ll heap leaf mold around it about 6″ thick. When temperatures warm in the spring I’ll come out and pull some of it off.

A wheelbarrow filled with an assortment of leaves.

You are going to love the difference some leaves can make to your soil structure. If mimicking nature is up your alley, check out my Back to Eden Gardening Series.

Want to learn more about gardening and how to care for your soil? You will love The Shoestring Gardener.

Pound for pound, the leaves of most trees contain twice the mineral content of manure… And they provide the perfect nutrition for beneficial microbes. In short, they make soil come alive.
Composter Connection

A pinterest-friendly image for leaf mold.

6 Comments

I love that I found someone like-minded about not throwing leaves away. I blow all my leaves up into my flower gardens for mulch. While friends are raking and bagging or burning, I am collecting their bags and adding to my own stash. One year, my son worked in the lawn business. He needed a place to drop the leaves. I had the best vegetable garden the next year. I found that you could lay potatoes under the leaves and not have to dig them in or dig them out. Just pull the leaf mulch back when the potato crop was ready!

I am in a master gardening program and was told that leaf compost increases the pH of your soil. So be sure to add in other non-leaf compost to your gardening areas.

I hoard leaves for the composter!

I love this time of year. Leaves a plenty and my neighbors don’t want them 🙂

Jessica says:

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One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. You should see me hoarding the neighbor’s pumpkins after Halloween so I can give them to my chickens. I’ve gotten over being bashful about asking.

Reply

It’s the time of year where any conversation with a neighbor has them starting out with, “Ughh. Almost leaf raking time. I HATE blowing all those things.”

I love the leaf drop. I use leaves from our five acres for chicken bedding all year long, vermicompost bedding, mulch on the garden beds, and I make huge piles right at the edge of our woods just like you describe to have them break down over the year. I then use those piles when helping to establish new trees and bushes in my up and coming food forest.

This year I’m also going to corral in a large area with chicken wire to hold leaves to kill off the grass in preparation for seeding a huge wildflower patch in the spring for bee forage.

Bring on Fall! 🙂