Hi Larry,
It sounds like you’ve got composting down to a science. Your climate adds a lot more available time to the composting process. We have poor soil here, mostly clay. It was originally all farmland, mostly in corn and soy beans. Plant, grow, harvest, repeat. Use whatever chemicals are necessary to get maximum crop growth. Rainfall runs off and if you dig a hole the water stands in it for a long time. It's in need of lots of organic matter. We are currently just amending the soil around the things we plant but this fall we put down a foot of wood chips over the entire garden. Basically “no-till”, which will decompose and add an organic layer. Most of our leaves come from our neighbor’s yard, primarily oak. We have a stand of walnut trees and those leaves are also compostable, contrary to popular belief.
We have lots of night crawlers here, some the size of small snakes. They aerate the soil but don’t create concentrated compost. Not many other earthworms.
I’m with you on turning green waste into soil. An amazing process indeed.
