The kids and I emptied our first batch of leafs into the leaf bins.  It took a lot of convincing to get the kids to allow me to take their leaf pile away.  They didn't understand that there are more leaves yet to fall on the ground.  Many more leaves.  Oh, the leaves.  So we piled them into a sheet and dragged them to the back yard.

Emma got a kick out of me pretending to be Santa Clause.  I asked her what she'd do if she opened a gift from Santa and it was a bunch of leaves.  She said "I'd just make a pile with them."  After we dumped all the leaves, I put Emma and Elliot in the bins to play (actually, my secret plan was to have them compact the leaves).  There is one lesson I learned.  There's a certain thing a father should never hope to hear his little girl yell while playing in the leaf bin.  "I can't find my shoe!"


Amazingly, when the leaves are chopped up, they will take up very little room.  Experts say that chopped leaves take up about 1/20th the space of regular leaves.  We'll see how accurate that is.  I read that you can use a weed-wacker to chop up the leaves so I may give that a whirl (pun intended) while my lawn mower is getting repaired.  It feels really good to recycle my leaves and am anxious to see how we can put them to use in the spring.


Only 2 days after blowing and raking, our front yard is littered with newly fallen leaves.  This is our first home with a heavily wooded lot.  Living in a beautiful neighborhood with mature trees in the fall is quite wonderful - but it does come at a price.  Oh well.  I need something to keep me active to justify all my bad eating.  I only have 17 more days to blame that on the pregnancy.

See more leaf photos on our Facebook page.

My head is full of ideas and plans (good intentions) for our back yard.  For the past few years Nicole and I have been very interested in adding composting to our lifestyle.  So for phase 1 of many for the backyard, I decided I would finally construct some compost bins.  I've had basic ideas rolling around in my head for these so it was really great to actually complete these!

Our friends and previous owners had 3 really nice raised garden beds.  My first step was to remove all the wood from the garden beds.  They spent the summer growing over with weeds.  I used the wood from the raised beds and some additional scrap wood from a dismantled swing set to build the bins.

Though I had a basic plan in my head, I had to still engineer some of the details on the fly.   The slats on the front are removable for easy access.  Each bin is roughly 3'x3'x3' which is what is usually suggested.  I have a few plans for the bins.  One, I plan to use for all purpose composting - pretty much any and all yard scraps.  This compost will be available for flowers/plants in the garden beds.  The remaining bins I hope to fill with shredded leaves to use for leaf mulch around the property next spring.  I've never done this before so it will be an experiment.  Check back to see how it goes!  I still need to devise a cheap and effective way to cover the leaf bins to keep the leafs dry for the winter.  Let me know if you have an old tarp you can part with :) !

My next project will be constructing the plastic compost bin we purchased from Sam's Club.  This will go next to the wooden bins and will be used for organic compost to be used in our vegetable garden next Spring.  Here we will put our food scraps and other organic material.  Again, this is our first stab at composting so we'll see how it turns out in the Spring.

I screwed the bins right into the fence.  It seems very sturdy and should withstand the winter well enough.  We dumped our first pile of decomposed leaves into the all-purpose bin.  It had been sitting on the side driveway all summer in a pile and was nicely decomposed with some fat juicy earthworms helping out!