If what you've got now is almost digested, I would till in what you've got, and mulch the garden with the leaves and grass when the time comes. Then you can till that in in the spring, or just pull it aside and plant.

Since you're talking about tilling, I am assuming that this is a vegetable garden; am I correct?

Yes, you are correct, vegetables.

There are a few things I need to do. I need a rabbit fence installed so as to prevent digging under and I considered raising the beds for drainage and keeping the soil loose. Hoping for a respectable crop of tomatoes next year. So all this seems to indicate I want 24" wide beds with narrow alleys between and a short fence to surround each bed. Getting a bit older now so raising the beds will make for easier maintenance as well.

Thanks!

If you pile on more materials now, some of the new materials will have broken down enough by Spring to be a part of the compost, but you will have to fork the un-composted materials off the pile as a whole onto another spot to get at the compost portion of it all.

In regards to using it now or waiting until Spring, there are advantages and disadvantages to either way of using the compost. I think the different approaches are minor but others have strong opinions. One advantage of spreading it now is less digging of the pile overall, having used it up before adding all the new leaves, saving digging through it in the Spring.

In recognition that almost any intelligent method works for a garden and you can't really go wrong, am a proud supporter of the easiest-on-the-back approach.

If that compost was quite high in Carbon, brown, it would not be mostly composted a you have described. The bacteria that digest the material need Nitrogen as a fuel source or they don't work.
Many people add 2 to 4 inches of compost to the soil and think they have between 25 and 50 percent organic matter in the soil. My experience is that does not happen and the soil will have closer to 10 percent OM. 30 percent organic matter in soil is a lot and it will be quite difficult for you to get there. Aim more for 6 to 8 percent humus which will still require a lot of organic matter.

The advantage of the compost and increased organic matter in the soil is to get all the soil organisms working - something that doesn't start immediately. So there is an advantage to going ahead and adding the mostly decomposed compost to the soil now since you are not planning to plant until spring. Mixing in the compost, and then mixing another time or two between now and planting, will get this compost incorporated into the soil, loosening and improving it. When planting in the spring, it wouldn't hurt to supplement when planting in a new location like this, so do so. Then use the newer composted leaves and clipping, possibly also not completely decomposed, as a mulch around all your plantings. By next year at this time, all that will be worked more into your soil, so you can turn under the mulch after harvest, and you'll be starting the process over with what you collect next fall - to use it as mulch in the spring.

Agreed, in fact supplementing with 30% organic material (compost) is a good recommendation at least for an initial treatment of poor soil. Let's do the math.

30% compost. Half of the average compost sample is water - so organic matter content now at 15%. Some of that is minerals, i.e. not organic matter. Now at 10% or even less. Some of that will continue to degrade to CO2 and water following tilling, so only a fraction of it will become semi-permanent organic matter. If you were to send that soil to a lab after a few months it might have So a 30% addition of compost to soil does not result in 30% soil organic matter.

Once your soil is in good shape, an inch per year can maintain it (more or less depending on your soil), and a lot of people use more especially in high production vegetable plots.

This post was edited by toxcrusadr on Mon, Sep 8, 14 at 11:53

Thank you all, very helpful.

I may indeed till in the majority of the pile this autumn. The remainder to be used to start again in spring. We just had two nights in a row of below freezing temperatures and I expect the trees will begin shedding leaves in earnest. The garden is cleaned out except for some herbs and I may mulch these as well as a few ornamental in other gardens.

All the best, Doug

Deciduous trees leaves turn and drop in response to light not temperature, although a decrease in light happens at about the same time as temperatures start to fall.
Depending on where in the United States you are September may not be the end of the garden. Around here we often have another six weeks of growing after the first frosts, and many frost hardy plants can stay in the garden almost all winter. Certainly frost tender plants such as tomatoes, beans, etc. may not do very well without some protection but if sited properly and given some protection even those can last into mid to late October.
Compost is one form of organic matter, so when looking for organic matter to add to the soil do not just look for compost. Compost is vegetative waste and organic matter is vegetative waste, so shredded leaves, tilled in crop residue, cover/green manure crops, etc. all are organic matter.

A quick follow-up. We are now having cold nights in the Colorado Front Range area and days are moderate.

Contrary to advice I received on the forum, my compost pile is still intact and I have not spread it out yet. This is mainly because I have another problem which I did not anticipate. The garden area has quite a network of tree roots and some are fairly large. A rototiller cannot effectively break this up so I am slowly working on it with a shovel and axe. In spring, I plan till in about 1/2 of the compost and use the rest on top of the soil around the plants. I calculate I have a total of 2 1/2 cubic yards on hand.

Even so, this compost pile is still cooking as evidenced by the fog it releases on cold mornings. So leaving it set will possibly help it finish. I also discovered, red worms have decided to winter over here and and are hiding deep enough to avoid the cold and I don't want to evict them just yet. I choose a warm day about once per month to turn it all over, just to keep the compost aerated and add a little moisture. I have a new pile started behind that one from this autumn's leaves and yard cleanup, I mixed some few grass clippings to balance things out. I also "primed" the pile with a couple shovels of compost from the first pile (thinking chemistry here). To contain the leaves, I put up two of circles of chicken wire fence; made from a 10 ft lengths of wire so I calculate almost 16 cubic feet each. The leaves I have on hand filled them to the top and I still had a few leaf & lawn bags left over. I simply put these bags on top of each pile to keep the wind from emptying them out. I also figured they might serve to help insulate the wire bins from heat loss. I will incorporate these bags of leaves as the contents of the bin shrink down.

After the first week there was not much activity but last weekend I turned the contents over in the new bins with a digging fork and moistened it again. This morning, three days later, I went out outside when the air temperature was about 30ðF to incorporate a few kitchen scraps into the new pile. I was fairly amazed at the amount of fog coming off the bins. On the first bin, I turned the contents over in a couple of spots and the leaves were steaming nicely. They also appear to be rapidly breaking down. I decided to get a thermometer and measure the second bin, it read 125ðF. From the outside air, that's a temperature difference of 95 degrees! It would seem that what I am doing is working just fine.

It sounds great to me doug. Good plan on saving a few leaves to layer with your kitchen scraps over the winter, and stacking them on top is a perfect way to insulate. After all, most heat is lost through the attic. :-]

Too bad about the tree roots. Even worse, if those trees are still there, they are going to grow back in, especially when there is a smorgasbord of amended soil and extra water. Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you should expect that.

Doug,

Nice work with making a compost pile. Kudos.

I would recommend that you buy commercially produced compost for tilling into your soil and save your compost for use as a mulch to be used after your plants are established. Unfinished compost is hard on roots and prevents germination of seeds and if your compost is still steaming, I doubt it will be finished in time for tilling into your soil. Cover it to keep heat and moisture in the pile.

Again, nice job getting a compost pile started. You might want to start a new pile and let your current pile finish.

Paul

That's certainly true if you're going to plant soon, but since it's winter, things would have time to finish and mellow whether in the pile or in the soil.

Having said that, I usually till in only finished compost. If I was digging up a new bed right now for planting in spring, I'd probably till in some finished compost and use the half-done pile as a mulch to protect the soil. Worms will go to work on the newly tilled in organic matter, and the mulch works as a nice blanket to moderate the freeze/thaw which helps the worms.

Good from you Doug to let the worms be warm inside !

And thanks for sharing, it's nice to imagine all the great things happening in your steaming piles !

Shovel and ax, you're brave ! Good luck !

I don't mix leaves with any other compostable material, nor would I ever till them into garden soil. Chopping them up is great I suppose, makes them more immediately useable, but: its a lot of fuel and equipment and work to chip/chop them. Used immediately, they will not have been formed into leaf mold. What I do copies nature, where leaves fall together, layer, hold moisture, restrict aeration and after three years mold completely. To me composting is aerobic, can include manures, wood chips, plant scraps of all kinds, but the breakdown is aerobic...I leave the leaves out.

Also want to add that leaves often have waxes and/or lignins in them that are resistant to composting and quite capable of gumming up the works so to speak.

"them that are resistant to composting"

Resistance is futile.

;-)

Lloyd

All,

Good to hear all this. I am only bumping this topic with updates as I find the information useful and hopefully so will others.

To be clear on a few points, I originally did use my chipper to reduce freshly fallen leaves but no more. I keep them loose long enough to dry thoroughly and then they easily crush to smaller size by hand, only about 30 minutes work. At this point I started my new pile for next year, mixed in some greens and a couple shovels of old compost to "prime the pump". This is the pile that is already very active with internal temperatures near 125 F. I will continue to monitor the old and the new piles as I am in Zone 4 and our coldest months are January/February. In addition, we are semi-arid around here and I will need to occasionally add moisture.

My old pile is indeed fogging but only slightly and it is visible only on the coldest of mornings. I will stick my thermometer in the pile to make certain what the temperature actually is before tilling into the soil.

Best of holidays to you all.

I'd like to share a recent experience regarding composting leaves - oak leaves, which people regard as especially difficult to compost. I ran more than two yards of newly fallen oak leaves along with some of previous year's leaves, into a hammermill chipper/shredder (Merry Mac 12P). That shredder has a 3/4" screen and the leaves came out in smallish flakes. These went into a little windrow that I kept covered with plastic to keep heat and moisture in. This 1 1/2 yard pile of shredded oak leaves heated up and composted. I eventually moved the pile into a bin and the last time I saw it, the red wigglers had moved in.

My point is that shredding leaves enables a very satisfactory compost reaction. I suppose that all the ragged edges of the shredded leaves allows the microherd to gain access to the leaf's interior.

You could be right about the ragged edges allowing the little bugs to get in. I have always considered this a method of allowing better circulation of both air and moisture. I happen to have a cottonwood (also not the best of trees for composting) and if the full size leaves are placed in the bin, they will mat together into a barrier that rivals lawn clippings. I use my spading fork to break these up every few days. So, allowing the leaves to dry and then crushing them seems to work very well.

All that said, I have been monitoring pile temperatures with my 12" long quick read thermometer and the compost has finally gone cold. Unless we get a number of consecutive warm days, I expect very little activity for awhile. Even so, I continue to mix in kitchen scraps and coffee grounds. When the little guys do wake up from their winter sleep, there should be plenty of feasting.

Best, Doug

Doug, I don't recall the size of your compost pile(s) but in my 4 x 4 x 4 piles 12 inches in is not much. It can get fairly chilly in that distance, but deeper in the pile the temperatures generated by the bacteria digesting that material can remain fairly high even into February, if the mix is good.