Make Your Own Potting Soil: Leaf Mold

Leaves I gathered today to make next year's batch of leaf mold.

I got the idea of making my own leaf mold from an article in the December 08/January 09 issue of Mother Earth News magazine (http://www.motherearthnews.com/). I have always traditionally used peat in my potting/seed starting mixes, but was inspired to make my own leaf mold as a more sustainable, local replacement. I spent about two hours today collecting materials for a new batch and processing a nearly finished batch that I made up last year. Everything I have read says it takes around 2 years to make a batch of slowly composted leaf mold. This seems about right, as my batch from last year was not totally decomposed.

Here I dumped my old leaf mold from one container to another container atop freshly gathered leaves.

Partially decomposed leaf mold prior to sifting.

My sifting set up includes an old bee box with hardware cloth stapled to one side, a wheelbarrow, and several buckets. The method below can be used to sift any kind of compost.

• Dump a manageable amount into the sifter.
• Tousle the leaf mold to scare up any worms. Remove the worms and put them into one of your buckets. You can later add these to your new leaf mold pile or use them for fishing.
• Rake your fingers and palm across the compost alternating with a circular motion to force the small bits through the sieve.
• When there are only twigs and large chunks left in the sieve, dump it out into one of your buckets. This can be added back to your fresh batch of leaves to inoculate it.
• Collect finished, sifted leaf mold in a separate bucket for use in potting mixes.
• Repeat until all of the leaf mold has been processed.

Finished, sifted Leaf Mold