Hello my name is Katie Rushworth and today I'm going to show you how to make
leaf mould. Now leaf mould is a brilliant free resource that you can get from your garden,
it is super easy to make and it's an excellent soil enricher.
The first thing you need are leaves which I have loads of under this beautiful red oak tree
and I'm going to gather them all up together. Now ideally you want them to be blemish free,
no signs of disease on them whatsoever. Sometimes you see little black spots and that's a fungal
disease. Now we're making leaf mould out of this that will be spread all over the garden
and we really don't want to contaminate or infect and other areas so nice clean leaves.
Sometimes raking like this, seems like a never-ending task so it's really nice to get something
back from all the hard work not only a tiny garden but something that's going to benefit
the soil and the plants. Now this is definitely something I would advise doing without company
of children or dogs because if you have children like mine they love nothing more than to kick
through all the leaves that you've just swept up.
The great thing about using a leaf rake like this is it's got really wide tines so you
can be really quite tough over any of these shrubs, any plant that's filling the ground
and they will really create minimal damage we've also got a nice bit of flex so it makes
the job an awful lot easier. Okay so that's my first lot, now I need the mower. A wonderful
thing about using a mower is it also chops up all the leaves and making them smaller
like this really speeds up decomposition so this will be usable leaf mould any luck
within six months and now I just need to tip it into a bin liner so I've also saved my
back as well. Now it's really important to squeeze out
all the air from the bag, if the leaves are really on the dry side you can add some water
from the watering can just a little sprinkle will help that moisture will help start the
decomposition process. But these are quite damp as it is and then all that's left to do is
stab the bag with some holes because that oxygen and air circulation will really help
as well get things moving along and mean that we have leaf mould really quickly.
Just going to pop some holes in the bag and the only thing left to do is to put this
in a dark corner somewhere out of the way it could even go under a hedge
or down the back of a garage or the side of a
shed but somewhere where you're not going to see it cause it's not pretty. Every kind
of a couple of months you can pick the bags up give them a really good shake again to
get that air circulated inside the bag and fingers crossed by springtime you'll have
a really usable lovely mulch and that means spreading all over the garden.
The wonderful thing about mulch is one it's free, two it's super easy to do the worms
do all the hard work so they will bring and drag all those nutrients from the leaf mould
into the soil which feeds the plants where they need to be fed the most and that's the
roots. It's really that simple, have a go.
his is one I did about eight months ago and it's lovely . It's totally changed, its
appearance and it smells quite sweet it's great I'm going to use that on the garden
today. It's really that easy for more videos visit
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