Making leaf mould & a recipe for potting compost

Leaf mould is a lovely old fashioned term, and brings to mind old Estate gardens and poorly paid, overworked garden boys.  It often appeared as a magic ingredient alongside weathered soot and wood ash and ground up toe nails!

But for us it is a natural plentiful resource and a vital ingredient in our potting composts. Over the years we have steadily reduced the amount of peat in our mixes and leaf mould is really useful.

The native trees that shed their leaves for us are Hazel, Birch and Oak, and of course we are a garden and we also have lots of Maples, Cercidiphyllum , Chestnut and Larch.

The leaves fall onto beds and along the paths.
This make for easy pickings and any dry day from late October onwards, there is often someone out there, with a bucket, a rake and a collection old compost bags.

Rebecca hard at work with the rake

The leaves are poured out into compost bins constructed from wooden pallets and when we have a bumper year, we make wire netting cages to take them all.  

There they sit for 2 years, slowly mouldering.
Each leaf has its own characteristics.
Oak is tough and takes 2 years to rot down.
Hazel is much softer and takes a year to 18 months.

Inevitably there is the odd holly leaf in the mould. They are a pain, literally.  They are always a surprise, and take forever to rot so they retain all of their prickles. Again natures wee joke.

Leaf mould is also a great mulch, in fact it is nature’s mulch in our woodlands
We like to return some to the beds every year.

Here’s our recipe for general purpose potting compost

Sieved Leaf Mould 1/3^rd
John Innes No3 1/3^rd
Grit/Gravel 1/6^th depending on the plants to use it
Fibrous Compost 1/6^th to 1/3^rd (You could use peat, but there are now many more sustainable alternatives available)

^{Happy gathering,  M}

^{For more advice about the benefits of leaves read Donald's Autumn Blog from 2009}

^{Love Your Leaves}

My Himalayan love affair - Meconopsis

Blue poppies are things of dreams. They startle and spell bind each time you see them in flower.

The first blooms for this year, were there today. They are early; I usually expecting them late in May and into early June. The mild, sunny, dry spring has hastened their appearance.

I saw my first Meconopsis back in 1980’s at Jack Drake’s Nursery. John Lawson who ran the nursery then was a friend and mentor and a great plantsman. He knew how to grow plants to perfection, and a day discovering his trilliums and meconopsis was a rare and lasting treat.

Why are they so entrancing, it is the quality of the petals. They are large and satin textured. In a spring of white, yellow and then the pinks and reds of our early rhododendrons, suddenly they are there, a heart stopping blue.

There are various varieties and species of course, and it is always a surprise to remember our own common welsh poppy is a meconopsis, but these Himalayan beauties are sublime.

Over the years we have tried many meconopsis from seed. Some wonderful, many unsatisfactory

It is because of this latter state that I have just gone from this page, to the Meconopsis group web site and renewed our subscription. The Meconopsis group was founded in Scotland has undertaken the heroic task of sorting out the confusion of varieties and strains of Meconopsis that were throughout Scotland and UK gardens.

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Now we grow Meconopsis sheldonii types, which settle and become perennial for us. We have some clumps of Slieve Donard that have grown well for years and a very old plant of Rogers’s nursery, which has thrived on benign neglect.

I always tell people to feed, feed, and feed them. They are gross feeders, loving animal manures if you can get it, or that wonderful smell of spring, dehydrated chicken manure; nothing like it.

Over the bank holiday weekend, I have spent the 2 sunniest days of the year so far in the dappled shade of the woodland area of the garden. This is where the blue poppies are happiest, shade but sunshine too. They like a place where they do not get too dry, and most summers we can provide that alright. Think of them amongst Bowles golden grass, Millium effusum, or amidst a stand of variegated Solomon’s seal Polygonatum oderatum variegatum

Definitely time to get back to seed exchange and visiting other gardens to continue this love affair.