How do you burn leaves? (A serious question!)

Riding through Wray castle yesterday I saw several piles of fallen leaves, slowly burning themselves to ashes. I've got hundreds and thousands of leaves here and I thought that burning them would be a good idea. Only problem is how to do it. Any one know? They only smoulder, probably because they are dampish, but how do you start the fire off, and then keep it going?

Perfectly true, but leaves take a minimum of 12 months to rot down, quite often longer, and in the meantime they have got to be stored somewhere. Can't leave them on the garden because that way environmentally unfriendly pests and diseases can be harboured. The ash contains lots of phosphates which helps to promote growth if mixed in with the compost heap.

We put ours in any old bin or fertiliser bags we have lying around. Pop a couple of holes in the side of the bags and tuck them away in a corner of the garden to be used as mulch or compost next year. The tomatoes came up a treat in it this summer.

We put ours in any old bin or fertiliser bags we have lying around. Pop a couple of holes in the side of the bags and tuck them away in a corner of the garden to be used as mulch or compost next year. The tomatoes came up a treat in it this summer.

you need a proper fire first, no leaves.
when its burnt down and there are some good embers, pile on the leaves, really pile them on the heavier and damper the better.
the embers will then smoulder for days from the inside producing minimal smoke.

Thanks SOO...I'm trying to clear leaves from 10 full grown horse chestnuts, two sycamores and three oak trees. So you can see that piling them up is not reasonable. I'm going to need a large trailer to take them to the tip, or 325,761 black bags to store them in. Burning seems the most practical solution.

If you have that many tress that size I'd just get them all in a corner somewhere and leave them to rot down - you clearly have more than enough space to do this and it woudl be entirely reasonable, imo.

If you have that many tress that size I'd just get them all in a corner somewhere and leave them to rot down - you clearly have more than enough space to do this and it woudl be entirely reasonable, imo.

Ski, Unfortunately the set up works against that. Most of the area under the trees is planted with evergreen shrubs/low growing conifers. Instructions are to keep them clear of fallen leaves. Not much room to stow leaves underneath. Some I do mow, and lawn cuttings mixed with chopped leaves do rot down quite quickly, and make a good mulch. Even if I mow the leaves there is still the storage issue, and as leaves on their own take more than a year to become serviceable compost, I need a lot of spare space which isn't available.

So, burning seems a good option. I know the townies and beardies don't understand, but that's life.

If your horse chestnuts are suffering from leaf miner (brown yellow tinge towards the end of the leaves from the middle of summer) the best thing for the trees health is to burn the leaves as it will reduce the infestation next year.

Otherwise I would advocate composting, you could save yourself a fortune on bark mulch.

My big horse chesnut has leaf miner - seems to cause it no problems whatsoever, masses of conkers this year! Each autumn I take about 10 bags of leaves to the tip, If I leave the on the lawn they kill the grass. My next door neighbour leaves the lot where they fall hence leaf miner back again by July...