Sandy, do you have a lawn? I would mulch mow some of your leaves into lawn if possible when a portion of them have fallen - instant organic matter for your lawn. Collect some coffee grounds if you are near a starbucks and you can sprinkle those in your pile. Neighbors grass clippings make good greens (I prefer neighbor who does not apply chemicals to lawn). Shred leaves for fall garden mulching, and if you can store some of the leaf bags, you would have wonderful makings for mulch in the spring.

You can add some high nitrogen lawn fertilizer to the pile to speed things up.

Leaves will decompose with adequate moisture and air. Because there really aren't any pathogens I'd not worry too much about getting heat in the composting of just straight leaves. Sure heat is fun and it will speed up the process but it isn't absolutely necessary so don't panic about getting greens.

As far as C:N of leaves, Steve Solomon has a nice chart with some actual numbers including maple in chapter two.

Lloyd

When maple tree leaves are shredded with a lawnmower, the volume is much reduced, to maybe 30% of the original volume. The leaves should be fairly dry, and they should be raked into windrows, about three feet wide by one foot high. Its a messy process, and there is raking involved in the clean-up. I collect the shredded leaves on a pvc tarp, and drag the load over to the compost pile. They make great compost, eventually. It takes them 6 months or a year to break down.

After shredding, or even if you don't shred your maple leaves, gather them into a pile and wet them completely. Toss the leaves while running a sprinkler on them to make sure you get them all good and wet. Then take a small amount (relative to the volume of the pile)of sifted soil and toss it into the leaf pile and mix it in real good. Then cover the whole pile with a tarp and leave it all winter. Weight down the edges of the tarp with rocks or bricks so it stays in place tightly over the pile. In the Spring you will have fine dark leaf mold that is great for all plants as a mulching fertilizer. Feed some of it to your worms too they love it. Cheryl

Sandy, the information one sometimes reads about ideal ratios and layers and so on - they probably do a fantastic job of maximizing heating in the pile, or minimizing overall time to finished compost. But it isn't necessary to follow them in order to get good compost.

As some have said, if you shred the leaves and keep them damp, they'll compost pretty well by themselves. But I us an in-between approach. Every autumn I shred all the leaves I have room for (the others get raked to the street and the city makes compost out of them). Then, all winter long I add kitchen scraps to the pile, stirring them in some each time. In the spring, I still have recognizable bits of leaf, a ton of worms, and I've avoided putting lots and lots of good organic matter into the garbage from kitchen scraps. The neighbors in the next three houses to the east of mine all start dumping their grass clippings onto my pile in the spring (and one house adds kitchen scraps all year too), and all I have to do is stir it in to get a HOT pile each time. (Yah, they should be mulch mowing, but when I see them putting clippings into the dumpster I always invite neighbors to come use my pile.)

Anyway - bottom line, even a lackadaisical approach like mine yields great compost eventually. At some point in the spring I decide the pile should stop getting new stuff, so it can finish off. I put a sign up telling the neighbors to add their stuff to the other bin (which I've just finished digging out and using), and the cycle begins again.

Honestly, I compost more to avoid adding to landfills (and to be entertained by the process, and to get exercise) than because of a craving for the compost itself. That is - I like the stuff! I just am not in a huge rush to make it; the slow process I have works nicely for me.

lcpw

Shred the leaves, make sure they're good and wet, and it will make no difference that you don't have that much greens to put with them. They'll compost. Maple leaves probably break down the fastest of any of the leaves. Just make sure they're shredded so they don't clump together. And wet. Dry leaves don't decompose.

Deanna

The absolute lowest input method would probably be leaf mold. Make a couple of containers with chicken wire. Pile in the leaves unshredded. Try to get at them before they have formed a wet compacted layer on the ground. Put something on top to stop them blowing about eg old carpet, cardboard and a few weights. Then forget about them. Have a look every few months. When they're crumbly and brown and earthy looking use them to top dress anything you like.

Here is a link that might be useful: leaf mold

You may be trying to make this more difficult than it should be.

The maple and sweet gum leaves I collect are used a bit differently from the oak leaves. The range of C:N values of leaves usually range from 20:1 to 70:1. I think one list of tree leaves had maple at around 20:1, which is on the green side (30:1 is the dividing line).

If you use the leaves while they are freshly fallen, you may find a pile (4'by4'by2'tall) will pretty much self-decompose.

Just what the C:N ratio of leaves would be will depend on when they are harvested. Leaves with some green will have a very low C:N ratio, probably like 20:1, while the leaves that have turned color completely will be in the 40:1 range and leaves that have been laying around for several months will be more like 80:1.

I would like to compost all of the maple leaves. But it is a LOT of leaves, and I don't think I can come up with enough of the green stuff to put with the leaves to do a good job.

You are researching too much and making it harder than it needs to be.

Leaves compost in the forest just fine without coffee grounds, 'greens" or much of anything. Moisture is all you really need.

Make some round chicken wire bins 3 to 4 feet across and pack the leaves into the bins, soaking them with water every foot or so of packed leaves. Leave them alone all winter and they will compost just fine.

I used to do that with mixed oak, maple and what-all leaves and by spring I had mostly decomposed leaves that were great mulch and garden amendment.

For the last four years I have collected the neighborhood fall leaves. Most are oak, maple, and sweet gum. Some of my mesh bins are four feet in diameter, larger ones are 5'by8'by 2' high. Bins consisting of all or mostly oak leaves show slow breakdown (sight and core temp); while the bins containing maple and sweet gum show a more rapid breakdown, with core temp of 110 or 120F. These bins require watering and turning every four to ten days.

So my greens (grass and coffee grounds) go in the oak leaf bins, and the maple/sweet gum bins are left to decompose on their own.

I just rake the maple (and all the other leaves) into piles then use them whole to mulch the gardens. Much less work and far more environmentally sound than trucking in commercial mulches or using fuel to chop the leaves up. Does a great job as mulch. And they do break down without being shredded. But I don't want my leaf mulch to break down too quickly so the leaves remain whole.

I've been plagued with the same job every year. This year is different :)

Due to travel, I couldn't get the leaves up before they were saturated. So, I left them all season. Today I rented a Lawn Vaccum from the local rental company. This was the strongest they had. To my surprise, it not only vacuumed up the leaves, but shredded them to fine pieces. This inturn reduced over all volume by approx. 1:15 volume. I'm now going to just toss them at the side of the house and wait.
One thing I was thinking of was to add a bunch of worms to the 16'x10'x2' pile of leaves. I heard worms create fantastic soil.

I'd like to know two things.. confirmation that worms would be better than nitrogen and how do I keep the critters away from my wormy friends.. :)

Cheers!
Ken

Worms will work slower than adding nitrogen to make a hot compost pile. Leaves alone can take a year or more to compost, but the results are fantastic.

Keep in mind the worms may or may not stay around your leaf pile. They have to have just the right moisture and food and temperature conditions. Generally composters don't try to add worms; it's more of a 'if you build it, they will come' sort of thing. There is an entire micro-herd besides worms working in there, too.

My yard has two large maple trees, and is bordered by other deciduous trees. I raked the leaves into a long, tidy berm at the back of the yard, about 6' wide by 25' long. It was about chest high originally but has already shrunk down to half the original volume in a few months. I know shredding them with the mower would speed up the composting, but I prefer not to use the extra fuel and create noise pollution. I suppose others would find it a lot of labor, but I am easily amused and enjoy the exercise - by using a large tarp to drag the leaves I can keep the pile neat with minimal effort and almost no lifting. I also add kitchen waste to one end of the berm, and add horse manure when I get the chance (my friend works on a farm and I bring along a 5-gallon bucket when I visit him there). I plan to work a lot of the mulch into my vegetable garden in the Spring. When I lived in SE Mass years ago, I kept chickens & it was swell to throw all my (mostly oak) leaves into their pen - they'd work them over for the bugs and add their alkaline waste - it all broke down into wonderful soil - bright green grass sprung up right under the white pine trees (where no grass had grown before) when I moved the chicken enclosure.

Thanks for sharing your experience, Elisabeth. First-hand knowledge is the most valuable of information.

I shredded a rather large collection of fresh oak leaves and piled them into a windrow on a plastic sheet. I covered the windrow with more plastic. The pile wasn't sealed but it was well covered. Oak leaves have a reputation of not composting quickly, but this pile of fresh oak leaves, nothing else, just oak leaves, heated up and composted steadily.

I emphasize the word fresh because I believe that freshly fallen leaves still have some green-ness in them, enough to nurture bacteria. I have seen a layer of freshly fallen maple leaves start to decompose on the lawn enough to stun the grass underneath the leaves, turning the grass yellow. The layer of fresh oak leaves under the oak tree had no such effect. So it seems that maple leaves are quite compostable when they are fresh. I'll bet they would get quite hot if they were shredded and piled.

So, yes, I'd consider freshly fallen maple leaves to be an excellent, if perishable, feedstock for compost. If you collect them while they are 'fresh', pile them together, cover them to trap in the heat, moisture and ammonia, they will compost nicely.

Plant leaves are green in color because of Chlorophyll, not Nitrogen. The levels of N in leaves has little to do with the color of the leaf.

kimmq is kimmsr

When I say 'green-ness' I'm talking about the carbon/nitrogen thing, the presence of enough of the nitrogen of fresh leaves to allow composting. Once a leaf has fallen and allowed to dry, it seems to become a 'brown' as opposed to a 'green'. It's my experience that green leaves that are pruned from a growing tree, that are shredded and piled, will heat up, demonstrating that they have tons of nitrogen in them.

So, I'm proposing that leaves that have just fallen from a tree in the fall still contain enough nitrogen to support composting without the addition of some sort of 'green' feedstock. If you shred freshly fallen leaves and pile them (and cover the pile to trap heat, moisture and ammonia in the pile) you'll have a composing compost pile.

(Edited to remove evidence of my childish behavior. With my apologies.)

Idaho, I think that the presence of moisture in fresh leaves also speeds up the decomposition process.

Sometimes I think kimmsr is stating the obvious for the benefit of the inexperienced, and other times I think he's being condescending with all of us, and other times I can't tell which one it is. In any case let's avoid name-calling. This is a compost forum for cryin' out loud. If we can't maintain civility here, the world is in deep trouble.

tox, you're right, of course. Kimmsr, I apologize for the name calling.