We’ve been composting the mulch that comes out of the leaf shredder in a DIY compost tumbler we made:

The compost tumbler is based on this design.

I didn’t wait for the stuff to fully break down because we wanted to experiment with it, and there is a lot more shredded leaves to compost. (It is time to make a few more tumblers, I think.) The tumblers really help in aeration of the leaf mulch as it is composting, so it seems to compost much faster in the tumbler than in the piles on the ground. The tumbler also helps make it easy to mix in green leaves and fruit trimmings to get the right balance of chemistry to speed up the composting process.

So here is a picture of our first planting of bamboo to both sides of our boat dock gate. You can see how black the mix of soil and compost is. I’m hoping it really improves the water retention and other properties of the poor quality soil around the bamboo.