Artificially aging oak leaves?

[pickle01]

Has anybody tried artificially aging or fermenting freshly fallen oak leaves for flower beetle/millipede substrate? I'm wondering if they could be shredded and treated essentially like oak sawdust used in flake soil to create usable material within a few weeks. It's hard to find places that have multiple years of leaves left in place to naturally age, so I'm just curious.

[JoshSud]

Yea I believe so, I've been told by a german beetle breeder that you can make a fermented leaf substrate with a similar recipe to FS in a few weeks.

 

[pickle01]

On 12/15/2021 at 4:58 PM, JoshSud said:

Yea I believe so, I've been told by a german beetle breeder that you can make a fermented leaf substrate with a similar recipe to FS in a few weeks.

 

Thanks! It's basically just a process of speeding up the same decomposition that turns it into usable material in the wild - moisture, heat, fungi. I'll try it some time and share the results.