Very soon the leaves will fall from the trees and we will get busy with a garden rake and wheelbarrow to remove them, going to great lengths to bag them up and cart them across town to the recycling centre.

Then the following spring we head to garden centres to buy compost and spend an afternoon or two digging it into the flower beds.

Instead one can collect leaves from all over the neighbourhood and fill a compost bin. You can put them in a heap too but they have a tendency to blow away unless you mix in soil to weigh it down.

Apparently if you can shred them with a mower they compost faster. If you’re lucky, come March, the leaves disappear into a black soggy mush that is very good for the soil.

Depending on the type of leaves it might take another year. If the bin is over bare ground rather than paving then worms can get in and make it even better.

Take a look at the council composting site, worcestershire.gov.uk/letswasteless/info/8/composting for more details as it isn’t obvious what to do to get composting working really well. Kitchen scraps can go in as well, but you have to chop them up.

Cooked food doesn’t work, neither does anything meaty. Woody stems take another year or more to rot down, so they don’t help either.

Compost aids moisture retention within your garden, so plants don’t dry out so fast.

There are millions of tiny soil animals, microbes and weirder things than fungus involved in that black box – you could almost call it black magic.