Blessed with too many leaves? Shred em with your Weed Whacker

Excess leaves this Fall? Shred them!

I am blessed (cursed?) with more live oak leaves than I can use and most end up in the County’s composting yard to be turned to mulch. But I also need shredded oak leaves to mulch my acid loving Camelias, Azaleas and Rhododendrons.   Rather than resorting to a commercial shredder, -just to make a few small batches for these plants, I use the rather simple rig below. A 40 gallon black plastic plantintub and an ordinary electric string grass trimmer.  I simply load the pail with a half tub full of the leaves and apply the string trimmer until the leaves are well shredded. During the process I tilt the tub to get at the unshredded leaves that sink to the bottom of the pail.  The shredding process sends the chopped leaves in a circle to be contained within the tub. The walls of the planting tub are stout enough to withstand the string trimmer, but the leaves get chopped and finely shredded. As you can see, they shred nicely and decompose rapidly as a result. Great mulch! Good for small batches of compostable leaves.  This method is also handy for getting more leaves into plastic bags to be sent to the composting facility.

Photos available of tub and results

Jon Park, 127 Leslie Lane, Yorktown, Va. 23693