Start Hoarding Leaves Before Your Neighbours Bag Them
Every autumn your neighbours rake up a year’s supply of the one material your compost pile is always short of, put it in bags, and pay to have it taken away. Stockpiling leaves in the three or four weeks it is sitting on the kerb is the highest return on effort available to a home composter, and the window is narrow.
Why this is worth planning around
Run through what a household actually produces over a year. Kitchen scraps, weekly, wet and nitrogen rich. Grass clippings in summer, wet and nitrogen rich. Coffee grounds, wet and nitrogen rich. Almost every domestic pile is drowning in greens and starved of dry carbon, which is why so many of them go sour.
Dry leaves are the fix, and they are free for about a month a year. Miss the window and you spend the next eleven months buying straw, tearing up cardboard, or watching the pile turn to sludge.
A reasonable target for a household pile is six to ten bags. That sounds absurd until you realise a bag of dry leaves compresses to almost nothing once wet, and that you will be feeding them in a handful at a time from November to September.
Where to get them without being a nuisance
Your own yard first. Obvious, and for most people not enough on its own.
Kerbside on collection day. In most towns bagged leaves left for pickup are fair game, but check before you start loading a car. Some municipalities have rules about removing set-out material, and a neighbour who sees a stranger taking their bags deserves an explanation.
Just ask. The single most effective method. Most people raking leaves are actively pleased to hand them over, and several will start saving them for you next year without being asked again.
Landscapers. They pay by the load to dump. A polite offer to take clean leaves off their hands is sometimes very welcome.
What to turn down
Anything swept off a road. Road grit, salt and oil residue come with it. Verge leaves that have never been on the carriageway are fine.
Walnut, if you grow tomatoes. Juglone does break down during composting, but if you have a choice, take somebody else’s maple instead.
Bags with obvious rubbish in them. One dog waste bag in the middle of a sack will put you off the whole enterprise.
Oak and beech are worth taking but slow, because they are high in tannins and tougher. Maple, ash, birch and fruit tree leaves break down fastest.
Store them dry, or you have wasted the effort
This is where most people lose the benefit. Wet leaves packed into a bag turn into a black anaerobic mat that smells and refuses to break apart. Dry leaves stay loose, stay usable, and can be fed into the pile all year.
Keep the bags under cover. A shed, a lean to, a tarp weighted over a stack, even against a wall under the eaves. If you use a wire cage, put a lid on it.
Shred first if you can. Running a mower over a windrow takes ten minutes, cuts the storage volume by more than half, and roughly halves the time the leaves take to break down later. It is the difference between leaf mold in a year and leaf mold in two.
The three week window
In northern New England the useful period runs from roughly the second week of October to the first hard freeze, which in the Northeast Kingdom can arrive in the first days of November. Further south you get longer. Either way it is weeks, not months, and once the bags are gone they are gone until next year.
If you do one thing for your compost pile this autumn, it is not turning it. It is filling a shed with somebody else’s leaves.
Related reading on stockpiling leaves
What to do with them once you have them is covered in fall leaf composting, and the no effort route is leaf mold. For how leaves behave in a pile, see can you compost leaves and browns and greens. If your pile is currently sour, that is compost smells bad, and it is usually the same shortage.
The EPA’s home composting guidance covers the basic material balance if you want a second source.