Shredding Leaves For Garden Mulch

Hello, hivers!

Over the past week, I've taken a couple of afternoons to do leaf cleanup in the yard, and run them through my chipper/shredder for garden mulch. We had about a week of really nice weather for the beginning of November, and that gave me an opportunity to work outside in relative comfort. Our big maple tree in the back yard waits until late in the season to drop it's leaves, so I have to wait until late in the fall to clean them up.

On Saturday, the 6th, I dragged the shredder out to the garden from it's storage place and got it set up to do the shredding for the garden. I ran it a bit on Friday to test it to make sure it was going to work this year. Then I started piling up the leaves with the rake and the leaf blower. I used a garbage can to haul the leaves from the pile in the back yard to the garden where the shredder was set up.

Here's the shredder, set up and waiting to be used.

I usually set up a barrier to catch the shredded leaves so they don't just blow all over the garden. This year, I also wanted to keep them off the railroad tracks, that would be a mess to clean up. This fence keeps the shredded leaves in one area.

Here's the garbage can, full of leaves. I pack the leaves into the can to get as much as I can in each load.

I ran about 3 or 4 garbage can loads through the shredder that afternoon. I grabbed all of the garbage cans that I had available to use for hauling leaves to the shredder, plus I borrowed 2 cans from the neighbor for the purpose. It's easier to haul a bunch of cans of leaves to the shredder and then run them all through, rather than 1 can at a time. Doing multiple garbage cans of leaves at one time is also more efficient, and I could shut the shredder down for a while so that it wasn't running while I was filling the garbage cans.

I had some other things to take care of on Sunday and Monday, so I got back to shredding leaves on Tuesday, the 9th. I had filled 6 garbage cans on Saturday to have them ready for the next time, because I was running out of daylight on Saturday. I also had some corn stalks and sunflower stalks ready to run through the shredder.

I had a start on a nice pile of mulch from Saturday.

The neighbor who's garbage cans I borrowed had a big pile of leaves from the same tree that our leaves come from, so I also filled some cans from her pile to run through the shredder. I also borrowed a third garbage can from her, so I had 7 cans full at one time to run through the shredder.

I had shredded 6 cans full that were waiting for me on Tuesday, and I refilled those 6, and I also filled the garbage cans twice more after I borrowed the third can from the neighbor. So, I ran 6 can fulls through twice, and then 7 cans full twice. With those 26 cans full, plus the several cans full that I did on Saturday, I probable shredded about 30 garbage cans packed full of leaves. I ended up with a pretty big pile of shredded leaves.

I still have more leaves to do, but those will have to wait until the weekend. It rained last night and most of today, so I'm not going to try raking up the leaves until they've had a bit of time to dry. We're not supposed to get any snow for a week, so I should have time to finish cleaning up the leaves this year. This will give me a nice pile of mulch for the garden next year, and I'll probably haul a few totes full of the mulch up to my community garden plots for use up there.

That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!