hi

I have one tree that has the most obnoxious habit of any tree i've seen. it doesn't lose leaves but entire limbs throwing them off with a loud crack often 20 feet or more from the tree.. It does this in stages until all the limbs are gone resulting in a gigantic naked stick around 30 feet tall . Then it will regrow all the limbs at once with incredible speed unless the temps drop below around 40 in which case it throws them all off and starts over .lol

In spite of having the tree for over 20 years I still jump whenever it decides to "crack!! Interestingly I've never been hit while the wife has got it 3 times lol

gary

A lot of plants take their cues to go dormant and shed leaves by the shortening of days, some wait until the cold settles in and some, like my poor, confused Crape Myrtle, seem to need both. Even my blueberries and dogwood kept a few last faded green leaves until the cold nights finally settled in and then said, "Okay, we're done! Drop the leaves!" My live oak (okay, not mine, but it's in an empty lot that I get to use as a plant storage area and it shades part of my yard) hasn't started dropping leaves as much as you mention, but the leaf litter and shed limbs under it have built up since we had our first frost.

Michael, live oaks don't "drop" leaves until spring. They don't fall until the new leaves push them off, then they drop like crazy. I'm really looking forward to that, because we have an abundance of live oaks around here. I need a wagon to haul them from across the street, though. I love oak leaves because they take awhile to break down and earthworms love them.

Bravo on the composting! Some fools-okay that's a little harsh, lol..some less-aware people think oak leaves can't be used for composting. As you know, of course they can!

Apparently in Aussie Land lots of people say that you can't compost eucalyptus leaves, but the gurus of that country point out that, like our oak leaves, it can most certainly be done. The key is diversity of material (which really the key to any good compost). A pile of all oak leaves, or in their case eucalyptus, might take a long time to break down, but if other materials are mixed in, the leaves will be broken down.

Quite so. Shredding such tough, fibrous leaves and of course other material helps too. Interestingly, even a pile of just leaves-way out of the 25 carbon to 1 nitrogen (or so-I don't want to split hairs) balance required for rapid composting, will still in time break down completely. How is this so, you-imaginary person might ask? well, there's always a little bit of breakdown of the easy stuff, the sugars and so on at first, and in the process some CO2 is released. By this means...very gradually...the C/N balance drifts closer to that ideal range. That's why even in completely non-managed situations, decay does eventually happen. Yeah, I've been closely involved in large-scale municipal composting too, lol!

I don't bother to shred them. I layer them into the ground with the soil, and they break down very well, I usually do it in 2 inch layers in the hole, trench, whatever. Then I bury kitchen scraps around the plants on a regular basis. The leaves on top as mulch do take a long time to break down, but that's a good thing, and the large Chiquapin leaves mat down very nicely to keep weeds at bay. I remember reading that the British think we are INSANE for adding kitchen scraps to leaf compost. Leaf mold is their "black gold." I changed the entire structure of a yard full of marl by burying leaves in the soil. Of course, it took me 13 years to get it nice and crumbly, but I did it entirely with leaves, mostly live oak.

Different areas have different recipes for building compost. I have also seen where some Brits will put all their leaf litter in a bag to build leaf mold and they will dump nothing but greens into the compost bin. I believe this might have to do with their very short summers, so they want to burn through the compost as quickly as possible. But I have seen some take a more balanced approach. Kew definitely doesn't seem to discriminate between green and brown and will throw both into their massive mounds. It is from the Aussies that I picked up on the 'Diversity is the key' bit, but even from them... even from the SAME GARDENER I have heard fluctuating estimates on how much green and how much brown to use. Through it all there are two things I have picked up.

First is: Compost. Just do it.

And second is: If it can be composted, put it in the pile. If you start to see a negative affect, whether wet and smelly (too much green) or dry and slow (too much brown), add the material needed to get it back on track.

Agree^. The actual ratio of "brown" to "green" which is actually representative of carbon to nitrogen is something like 25/1. If you see 30/1, that's not off, that shows the range of acceptability. But due to the off-gassing of CO2 as I described above, even straight leaves, with their relatively low N levels, will decompose in time.

If one really wishes to get the very most out of their compost-and ideally, this works best if there is wooded land nearby-the material would be allowed to "cure" for a few weeks following apparent full decomposition. In this curing stage, another group of microorgansims colonize the material-things like actinomycetes..and these organisms make the product even better, primarily by causing it to act as a protectant against soil-born root-rot fungi.

Think I ever was involved in composting...lol?