Turning fall leaves into gold
Bath making rich topsoil for residents
By ROB PRICE THE COURIER-ADVOCATE

PHOTO BY ROB PRICE Bath village street crew members gather leaves for composting along West William Street.. For years, the village has made its own topsoil from annual leaf composting.

BATH - Every year at this time, Bath village Street Supervisor Jeff Muller finds himself up to his ears in leaves.

Muller's street crews are fanning out across the muncipality, raking piles of leaves into village trucks that carry the seasonal detritus to a municipally-owned site off East Morris Street. Muller estimates he oversees 200 to 250 truck loads - about 2,500 cubic yards - of leaves every fall.

But he's not complaining. In fact, for the past 16 years, Bath's street crews have been composting the annual dead leaf crop into rich top soil that can be recycled for residents' yards and gardens, not to mention along village streets and sidewalks.

"We haven't bought any top soil in the last eight years," Muller says.

Bath's street department has even become an environmentally friendly model for other municipalities. Muller last month gave a presentation to the Chemung County chapter of Cornell Cooperative Extension on how to convert dead leaves into a fertile municipal resource. "We have all these leaves," he explains. "We have a great site off East Morris Street, and we're re-using them as well as giving something back to residents."

Both village and town residents benefit directly from Muller's composting operation. Not only do street crews remove the dead leaves from local streets, area residents may then gather the end product of composting for their gardens and yards at no charge.

It's a simple process, Muller notes, using composting "wind rows" that allow pulverized leaves to break down into nutrient rich soil over a period of two to three years. Village street crews first gather the leaves and transport them to the municipal compost site, where the leaves are laid in long rows about eight feet wide at the bottom. Village crews stir and compress the rows over the following months; Mother Nature and nitrogen-rich grass clippings take care of the rest.

"We start a new wind row every year," says Muller. "Last year's wind row isn't that rotten yet. But there's 2004, 2003 and the 2002's."

Area residents will have to wait to sample those years until the compost site reopens in April (It closed Saturday). Once it opens, residents are also invited to dispose of their own brush and clippings at the site, and once a year, street crews employ a grinder to reduce brush to mulch, which is also available to residents.

In the meantime, you don't have to depend solely on Bath's composting operations if you want to experiment with your own leaf composting. Muller recommends looking at composting web sites for directions or calling the Cornell Cooperative Extension for instructions on backyard composting.

Here's a hint: To speed up the conversion to top soil, mix a little nitrogen-rich fertilizer in with the leaves. "Then just keep stirring it up," Muller says.