Collecting leaves and sidling around moggies

I've got a real thing going with collecting fallen leaves at the moment, its very energising and I'm loving it. Not only the ones on my own property, but on local paths. The road is about 20 yards away in this pic, good enough I think. Its mostly oak leaves so far: I have a very slight suspicion that they may contain a bit too much tannin (like acorns) to be good for my soil in very concentrated amounts (though I'm hardly going to collect that much!).

And its such a pleasure to walk through a glade of oak trees (other areas I collect from are more isolated than this), thousands of acorns round about, knowing that the squirrels will be having a field day. Then, next year, I'll empty the bags onto my heavy, heavy soil, and do the same again of course, and it will become beautiful, friable loam. I like the word friable :)

However, I'm *mostly* wondering about a different thing at the moment - a friend has contacted me to say that she's binning all the leaves that fall in her beautiful little courtyard garden, because they smell of cat wee. Yuck! I love cats dearly, and had a mother-and-daughter pair for 17 years, but ....

So, I've been doing some research, and contacted a few people about it, that I can trace online. The references are a couple of years old, so I'm not holding out too much hope. The real dangers seem to be from cat faeces - toxoplasmosis being right up there, of course. I don't think that its going to be a real issue for me - after all, the leaves are going to do nothing but sit in their plastic bags doing their thing while the worms do theirs, for a year or so, so anything actively harmful in the urine should have degraded over the course of a year. And of course, soil / loam / humus, whatever you want to call it, is worm poo. Truly! Just to be on the safe side, I didn't collect any leaves at all from around lamp-posts - those are for dogs, I reckon! And of course, I wear thick gardening gloves, of fake suede. Its a metaphorical minefield, once you get into it!

Another friend of mine made a couple of interesting points (he often does): "A reasonable rule of thumb with any airborne water-soluble chemical is that your eyes will start watering *way* before anything happens to your mucus membranes. Just think "onions"...Ammonia is not going to hang around for a year. It's very reactive, especially with various organic materials. That's why it is in kitchen cleaner. In terms of various life-processes, it's actually quite a valuable chemical."

I'll be keeping my eye on this - but I can't believe that my own leaves, which don't smell of anything, are dangerous. These are my bags of leaves - they're doubling as a mulch for where the blueberries will be planted next spring.