Compost?
JoeX
Posts: 1,783
I spent six hours today hacking this stuff off my fence and an over hanging tree.
Now I have a mountain of it taller than me!
Can I compost it?
The woody bits look like theyll go in my kindling pile.
There is still tonnes of it on the on neighbours tree and poking up from another neighbours side too so looks like I'll be fighting this battle for time to come.
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Can't you leave it for a while?
The flowers of ivy are a very useful food for bees at this time of year and the birds will eat the seeds in late winter.
Yes, and if you can leave it you will find it will shrivel down to a smaller pile ?
Yes, I've got to build a couple of composers out of pallets tomorrow anyway.
And don't worry - there is *plenty* left for the wildlife!
Thats good news. I already have a massive heap from trimming the monsterous laurel - apparently that's not compostable. Something to do with cyanide.
I add lots of shredded laurel and ivy to my compost heaps and it all breaks down just fine. The thing to be careful of is when actually shredding the laurel as the sweet smell is indeed caused by plant cyanides which are released when the leaves are damaged, so don't take huge lungfuls and shred so you are standing upwind. Once shredded, all plant chemicals are broken down by the composting process and the resulting compost is, well, simply compost. There is a similar myth about rhubarb leaves. They are in fact a suberb addition to a compost heap.
Can they (bay laurel and ivy leaves) make leaf mould?
Im putting one composter together, one dalek composter I have, and a chicken wire leaf moulder.
Plenty of leaves from the front gardens normal trees, but I've got this lot to find a use for. Don't want to take anything to the recycle unit if I can help it:
Evergreen leaves will compost down, but they take a lot longer than deciduous leaves.
Run the mower over them and it speeds things up no end.
Do dry out the bigger branches for kindling; they will be excellent.