Shredded leaves in the garden

Hello, steemians and garden lovers!

It's past the end of the garden season here in the upper Great Lakes region of the U.S. , so the only thing left to do in the garden is some preparation work for next year's garden. For me, one of the tasks is to cover the garden with leaf mulch.

In the past, I used to rake all the maple leaves into a big pile on the garden and just leave them there until the spring. The problem with that is that leaves don't break down very fast, and they're hard to till into the garden soil in the spring. They tend to bunch up in the tines of the rototiller and that makes it a lot harder to till the garden. The easiest way to solve that problem is to shred the leaves with a chipper/shredder machine. I've been wanting a chipper/shredder for probably 30 years, but I never could afford to buy one.

In the fall of 2018, I was looking at ads on Craigslist on the computer and came across a listing for a mid-size used chipper for a reasonable price. After inspecting it and making sure that it ran, I bought it and brought it home. Since then, I've been shredding the leaves onto the garden.

Once most of the leaves were off the big maple tree in the back yard, I dragged the shredder out to the garden from it's storage place and got it set up to do the shredding for the garden. I ran it a bit to make sure it was going to work this year, and then I started piling up the leaves with the rake and the leaf blower. I used garbage cans to haul the leaves from the pile in the back yard to the garden where the shredder was set up.

This is my shredder, with the discharge chute pointed into the garden.

I use a plastic garbage can to haul my leaves to the shredder . This makes it a lot faster to process the leaves.

I ran a few garbage can-fulls of leaves through the shredder before I quit for the day. This is the resulting pile. You'll notice that I built a bit of a fence around part of the garden. The fence is to keep the shredded leaves contained in the garden. Without it, the shredded leaves would go everywhere.

I had some other things to do, so I didn't get back to shredding leaves until a couple of days later. I had previously filled up 6 garbage cans with leaves so that I would be ready to go instead of having to take the time to fill the cans before I could start. I also had some corn stalks and sunflower stalks ready to run through the shredder.

When I finished shredding all those leaves and stalks, I had the start of a nice pile of leaf mulch.

I shut down the shredder and collected another batch of leaves in the garbage cans. This time I had 7 cans available, having borrowed garbage cans from the neighbor. Only 4 of the garbage cans are mine. The neighbor had a big pile of leaves in her back yard, so I filled 3 of the cans with her leaves. The big maple tree in the back yard is on the lot line, so it sheds it's leaves in both yards.

I ended up filling the garbage cans one more time after that load, and ran them through the shredder as well. At the end of the afternoon, I had a large pile of shredded leaves for the garden.

By the time I was done, I had run at least 30 garbage can-fulls of leaves through the shredder. The pile is big enough that I'll be able to take some of the shredded leaves up to my community garden plots to cover them for the winter also. I still need to do that before it snows.

That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!