Leaf

Leaf comes off garden beds and nowhere else in Graveyard Keeper 2. Nothing drops it, no merchant stocks it, and no bench produces it, so the only way to get leaves is to grow something and harvest it.

Every crop gives two, and it is the same two whether the bed is your first or your fiftieth. That flat rate is the thing worth knowing, because it is the one number on a bed that none of your farming perks will move.

What you do with them is Peat, which is the fertilizer the whole garden runs on, and alchemy, where leaves sit in 476 different mixes.

Every bed gives two, whatever your farm looks like

Nine crops grow in a Garden Bed and all nine hand over leaves: Wheat, Carrot, Flax, Beet, Hops, and cabbage, onion, pumpkin and grapes across their three quality stages.

The leaves go into the bed rather than your bag, so you collect them when you pull the crop. A bed takes twelve seconds to come through and pays two leaves on top of its produce and its seeds.

They also stack to ninety nine, where almost everything else in the game stops at thirty. The game expects you to be holding a lot of them, which is a hint about how much Peat you are going to want.

What leaves are for

Leaf is an alchemy ingredient first. It appears in 476 mixes, which puts it joint fifth in the game alongside Stick, Water and Berry, behind only Clay, Sand, Alchemic Powder and Flesh at 557 each.

Outside the laboratory it has exactly two uses, and both of them are Peat at a compost pile. Nothing else in the game consumes a leaf.

Peat, and why the second compost pile pays for itself

The first compost pile is two Board and twelve Stick, built in the Garden. It is unlocked by Fertilizers I:

That pile turns eight leaves into two Peat in three seconds, at Farming mastery one, and pays 1 a craft. The upgrade costs twelve Short Log, eight Bronze Nails and two Bronze Detail, and it changes the exchange rate rather than the speed.

What peat does is the part people get wrong. It is not a yield booster, and the game says so plainly:

Adds +1 Farming to the garden bed

Peat, in its own description

A bed carries its own Farming mastery, separate from yours, and the fertilizer is what raises it. That is how a bed grows a crop your own levels could not reach, which is the reason to keep making peat long after the garden looks finished.