Once chopped, leaves occupy much less volume.  My neighbor, John, a very serious gardener like me, keeps several large garbage cans filled with pulverized dry leaves for use as mulch when needed.  Were I a northern gardener I’d store shredded dry leaves in plastic bags over the winter to mix into compost piles when spring grass clippings and other more potent materials were available.  Some people fear using urban leaves because they may contain automotive pollutants such as oil and rubber components.  Such worries are probably groundless.  Dave Campbell who ran the City of Portland (Oregon) Bureau of Maintenance leaf composting program said he has run tests for heavy metals and pesticide residues on every windrow of compost he has made.

“Almost all our tests so far have shown less than the background level for heavy metals, and no traces of pesticides [including] chlorinated and organophosphated pesticides....  It is very rare for there to be any problem.”

Campbell tells an interesting story that points out how thoroughly composting eliminates pesticide residues.  He said,

“Once I was curious about some leaves we were getting from a city park where I knew the trees had been sprayed with a pesticide just about a month before the leaves fell and we collected them.  In this case, I had the uncomposted leaves tested and then the compost tested.  In the fresh leaves a trace of . . . residue was detected, but by the time the composting process was finished, no detectable level was found.”

Lime. There is no disputing that calcium is a vital soil nutrient as essential to the formation of plant and animal proteins as nitrogen.  Soils deficient in calcium can be inexpensively improved by adding agricultural lime which is relatively pure calcium carbonate (CaC03).  The use of agricultural lime or dolomitic lime in compost piles is somewhat controversial.  Even the most authoritative of authorities disagree.  There is no disputing that the calcium content of plant material and animal manure resulting from that plant material is very dependent on the amount of calcium available in the soil.  Chapter Eight contains quite a thorough discussion of this very phenomena.  If a compost pile is made from a variety of materials grown on soils that contained adequate calcium, then adding additional lime should be unnecessary.  However, if the materials being composted are themselves deficient in calcium then the organisms of decomposition may not develop fully.

While preparing this book, I queried the venerable Dr. Herbert H. Koepf about lime in the compost heap.  Koepf’s biodynamic books served as my own introduction to gardening in the early 1970s.  He is still active though in his late seventies.  Koepf believes that lime is not necessary when composting mixtures that contain significant amounts of manure because the decomposition of proteinaceous materials develops a more or less neutral pH.  However, when composting