Building Soil with Leaves: The Free Garden Builder

We are having lots of fun with leaf piles in the MHC gardens at this time of year!  We are gathering these leaves to use throughout the coming years as mulch, in our compost piles and as a rich soil amendment.

This free amendment has many benefits for the garden.  We collect large leaf piles at each of our gardens each fall. The leaf piles start to break down over the winter and by spring they are ready to use as mulch in our garden beds.  This nice dark mulch helps to warm the soil as it collects the heat of the sunshine. As this mulch breaks down further in the garden beds, it conditions the soil in many ways. The leaf particles improve soil structure and can increase the water holding capacity of soil by up to 50%.  This organic material attracts earthworms and much of the microbiota that make up healthy soil.  Leaf matter also adds twice the mineral content to the soil that manure would provide.

You can also gain these benefits by top-dressing your garden soil with leaf mold.  Leaf mold is the product of a leaf pile that has been sitting and breaking down for a year or two.  We are fortunate enough this year to have piles of leaf mold to top dress our garden beds over the winter, and to use in  potting mixes for our container plants and raised beds.

At home you can use this years' leaves to tuck your garden beds in for the winter. However it is recomended to shred the leaves first, as whole leaves can form a mat over your beds that keeps water and air from your living soil.  You can simply run your lawn mower over your leaves a few times to shred them before adding to your beds.

Another way that leaves add big value to our garden is as a compost ingredient.  We add leaves to our compost piles all year round as our main carbon source, and we end up with gloriously dark and loamy compost.  Leaves are a carbon rich material, and a good recipe for compost is 2/3rds kitchen scraps to 1/3rd leaves.

So don't put those leaves on the curb to be taken away!  Keep them, use them, and your garden will repay you with healthy plants, produce and flowers!

Hub Gardens at One Year

tomatoes thrive on our sunny patio
at the entrance to the food pantry

a row of cabbages in one of our garden beds
featuring soil built from sheet mulching

It's like a dream come true here at Mother Hubbard's Cupboard.  We've always wanted to share our community gardens with all of the folks using our food pantry services. Our three community gardens at Crestmont, Butler Park and Banneker Community Center have always been open and accessible to everyone, but sometimes seeing is believing. It can be challenging to convey the beauty and convenience of growing food right outside your door...unless...well, you have some food growing right outside your door!

from old washing machine basins to leaky wheel
barrows, many everyday objects can be
repurposed into planters

compost bins made from repurposed shipping pallets

Since moving into our new space last June, our on-site gardens have gone from zero to abundant in just twelve short months. Designed to showcase a number of methods of growing food in small spaces, the Hub garden site includes raised beds, window boxes, found-object container gardening, straw bale gardening, a food forest, herb spiral, perennial beds, lasagne/sheet mulched beds, and STRAWBERRIES! With an emphasis on keeping costs down and conserving resources, our gardens feature compost bins made from re-purposed wooden pallets, rain barrels, a low-tech irrigation system and plenty of mulch (straw, leaves, wood chips...).

a perennial bed lines the front of the building.
also in view: rain barrels and a new picnic table

permaculture inspired herb spiral built during a Hub workshop

Garden interns hand out seeds, plants and gardening tips from our patio, and lead folks into the garden to learn about growing food at home or to take home samples of freshly picked fruits and vegetables. Pantry patrons have picked strawberries, harvested spinach, peas, herbs and other greens, and youth groups have toured, tasted planted and harvested.

a view of the irrigation system and our new sign inviting
folks to join us in the garden

Window boxes constructed by eagle Scouts
line the ramp railing, and host edibles
such as this trailing squash vine

MHC's Garden Coordinator Kendra Brewer, remarked at a recent garden workday "The Hub garden is now where we hoped it would be in our first year. It's a real garden now."

Building Soil for a Healthy Harvest

This week MHC garden volunteers pulled together gorgeous harvests for the food pantry and bike cart.  We collected ripe, nearly bursting cherry, Roma, and Green Zebra tomatoes, large red and orange bell peppers, red and green velvety okra, Swiss chard, basil, thyme, and tarragon, cucumbers, and handfuls of banana peppers.

It takes an incredible team of knowledgeable garden volunteers, newbie garden volunteers bursting with energy, youth gardeners full of curiosity, and a community of supporters to make that harvest possible.  It also takes the use of many trusty sustainable gardening techniques to build healthy soil and grow such robust plants.  Over the years, many gardeners have shaped the methods used to make the community gardens so successful.  In today’s blog we’ll talk about the central sustainable gardening technique we use to keep our soil healthy and our harvests bountiful, recycling organic matter from the garden and food pantry to build the soil in the community gardens.

Growing food truly does start with the soil, and the Hub builds garden soil through packing it full of organic matter.  MHC’s most plentiful input of organic matter is hauled by trusty compost volunteers, who mix rotting fruits and veggies from the food pantry with leaves or straw in compost bins and turn it into a rich, organic soil amendment you may know as compost.  Winter and spring compost intern, Jessica Sobocinski, goes into more detail about this process in an earlier bog post.  Check it out for more information.

We also add organic matter directly onto open beds in the form of sheet mulching, also called lasagna gardening.  When sheet mulching we begin with a layer of cardboard or newspaper laid directly on top of the soil.  We then continue layering whatever organic matter we have on hand. Here are some examples of what we might add into a sheet mulched bed in the garden:

• Leaves
• Manure donated from a local farmer
• Compost from our pile
• Comfrey leaves
• Rotting fruits and veggies from the food pantry
• Straw
• Chopped up plant matter from plants that are finished producing in the garden (ex. old corn stalks)
• Chopped up garden waste (ex. weeds that aren’t seeding and won’t propagate from their roots)

We let the sheet mulched bed break down until we have a bed full of dark soil ready for planting.

MHC community gardeners recycle all the organic matter we can get our hands on, from the pantry and gardens, whether it be cardboard, paper, vegetable matter, or plant matter, and turn it into healthy and fruitful soil!  We encourage all in the Hub community to do the same, save your vegetable scraps in order to make broth, feed your chickens, sheet mulch your garden or add to your compost.  Recycling organic matter builds soil and is good for the environment and your budget.  Keep up with the MHC blog to learn about more techniques we use to keep our community gardens thriving!

–Stephanie

A Compost Tale: Interning in the Garden with the Hub

I began working as a garden intern with MHC this past January when I was assigned command of the Hub’s compost bins at the Crestmont garden. Its been a crazy, smelly, and magical journey since then and I want to tell you all about it!!

Since January Haley (a Hub volunteer) and I have been taking turns riding in the idiosyncratic trucks of compost volunteers Jay and Tom, picking up food waste from Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard’s pantry and two local businesses, the Village Deli and Soma/Laughing Planet.

When our journey began we were in the depths of a fairly mild winter, so most of the food we were dumping and digging into was in varying states of frozen. It seemed as if the layers of coffee grounds, stale bread, rotting greens, and overripe berries were determined to maintain their state of being, never surrendering to the natural process of decomposition that makes compost magic.However, once spring came and the ground began to thaw the compost bins finally began to awaken. What was once dead became alive as the microorganisms, worms, and other critters began to break down the food waste with the help of the oxygen introduced to the process through the turning done by interns and volunteers. As excited as we were that our compost was maturing, we were very disturbed by the putrid stench it released when turned. IT WAS RANK. One of our interns actually started dry-heaving while turning the compost; others chose to wear bandanas over their faces to mask the stench. There was no love to be found for our beloved infant compost.

As the intern in charge of compost, I felt responsible for the misery and was frankly embarrassed that I raised such smelly compost! I immediately began doing research and developed a trifecta approach to solving the stench. A) Before adding things to the compost pile, I would, with the help of Jay, Tom, and other volunteers, chop all of the food waste into smaller pieces with a shovel to encourage quicker decomposition. B) Intersperse the bread waste among the layers of compost so it was better mixed with the other food waste (because it is so highly processed, bread is particularly difficult to compost). C) Make sure the compost is turned at least once a week.

The test came when we had to remove the compost from the old bins so that the city could tear them down and replace them with fresh wood (the wood in the old bins was rotting). Several layers of unfinished and semi-finished compost were spread on the garden beds as sheet mulch as well as in piles for the new bins. Miraculously, it DIDN'T SMELL AWFUL!! It actually smelled pretty good (as good as rotting food can, anyway). The real treat came when we got to the bottom of one of the first compost bins I ever added to. Sitting among all the spiders, worms, and rollypoly bugs, there was a mound of matter that was a deeper brown than the rest. After a moment of breathless awe, I picked it up, felt it in my hands, smelled it, and danced around like a new parent. It was finished compost, some of the healthiest soil on the planet. It had the texture of clay mixed with fine sand and smelled just like freshly tilled dirt. The compost had reached the end of its journey and it was BEAUTIFUL. I kept a bit of it in a tiny mason jar that I keep in my room to remind me of the journey and humanity’s ability to responsibly deal with our waste, giving it back to the earth like an offering of gratitude for providing life.

~Jessica Sobocinski