This past weekend the temperature was just right to spend some time outside cleaning up some of those fallen leaves. Most of my neighborhood raked or blew their leaves to the curb... or more likely bagged the leaves and put them at the street. The city's loud truck came through and sucked them up to hopefully turn them into mulch and compost on a much larger scale than I will.
My next door neighbor and I put our leaves in my compost bin, but that quickly filled, so I put together a new leaf-only compost bin. The leaves were slightly damp from the drizzly weather we've been having, but it's good to make sure that the pile is damp throughout. I used my chainlink fence as one side of the pile and had some plastic plant posts (whoa there alliteration) and chicken wire to make the other 3 sides. I secured 3 of the posts and left one side open to rake most of my leaves and neighbor's leaves into the pile. When it got too high to rake more into it. I secured the last side with one of the posts and used an old recycling bin to put the rest of the leaves over the top.
Here's what my bins look like after some more rain and gravity settling a few days.
