Hi LCDollar

Not unlike other forms of compost, to keep it from becoming anaerobic it needs air. You can poke some holes in the bags. You can also add some greens to help speed up the composting process.

You could leave them just as they are and they will compost. It will just take longer.

You can use the leaves for insulating something in the bag. I have put bags of leaves over where the well top is. But I don't like the look of black plastic bags. I would make a pile somewhere in your yard and dump the leaves out of the bag. I hope they are heavy because they are wet. Sometimes heavy bags have other debris in them. Leaves are good composted or not. They are a good mulch over big sheets of brown cardboard from Sam's although a little slick to walk on sometimes. I put them around tomato plants over cardboard.

As long as you poke the holes in the bags for good air flow as Bonnie suggested, the moisture actually is beneficial as it helps the leaves decompose more quickly than they otherwise would. If you don't poke holes in the bags, you could end up with a really slimey mess by spring.

How you'd choose to handle them also depends on how you intend to use them in the spring.

If I want to turn autumn leaves into compost to enrich my garden beds, I normally run over them with the lawnmower in the fall to chop them up because that makes them decompose more quickly. Then I put the chopped-up leaves on the compost pile, layering garden debris and grass clippings (from our winter rye grass) with them to add nitrogen to the pile so it will break down into lovely compost by late winter. In a year when I'm using the leaves more for compost than for mulch, I usually stack the layers for weeks, catching new leaves in the grass catcher as I mow the lawn that's been overseeded with rye grass for the winter. By Christmas, I normally have a pile about 4' tall and most years it is roughly 6-'8' wide and 20' long. That sounds huge, but we are on rural acreage and have lots of grassland to mow and lots of trees that drop leaves. By spring, the pile is not very tall at all, but has turned into brown loamy compost that I can add to the garden beds at planting time..

If you want to use the leaves for mulch, it gets a little trickier. You still need to poke some air holes in the bags to avoid having the heat of the sunlight cause the bags to get incredibly hot inside. Without the holes, that kind of heat can make the leaves turn into a slimey, bacteria-filled and fungal-filled mess that you wouldn't even want to add to your garden. You'd poke fewer holes, though, if you want the leaves for mulch than if you want them for compost. You just want a little air flow, not lots and lots of it. If the leaves are intact and weren't chopped up by a machine that might have been used to gather them, then they'll remain largely intact and can be added to the beds as mulch in spring.

In a way similar to what Helen described, some years I've used bags full of leaves as mulch over areas I want to keep warmer in winter (like some areas where I grow plants that are marginally hardy here), with only a few air holes in the bags, and then have opened up the bags and used them as mulch in the spring. I'd rather pour them out and have them exposed to the air than store them in bags all winter, but that's just because the bags of leaves are not attractive in the landscape.

Another way you can use the bags of leaves is to prevent cool-season weeds from sprouting. If you grow veggies in areas that then remain mostly bare all winter or if you grow flowers in beds that are empty in the winter time, then you have a lot of exposed soil where weed seeds can sprout and grow. Putting several inches of leaves, or even bags filled with leaves, over the bare ground will greatly reduce the amount of bare soil where weeds could sprout.

I have a huge garden and live in a rural area surrounded by grassland interspersed with woodland. If I leave the soil in my veggie garden areas unmulched or not covered by a cover crop in fall and winter, I'll have knee-high winter weeds by the end of January and waist-high winter weeds by planting time in February or March. To me, it is more desirable to cover the bare ground with a mulch of hay, straw or chopped up leaves than to have to remove all those winter weeds in winter or spring. There are places where I don't do this, though. I have an area in the flower border around the veggie garden where I grow cool-season flowers like poppies and larkspurs that reseed themselves every year. I leave that area unmulched in fall and winter because the poppies and larkspurs can germinate and grow as tiny rosettes low to the ground even in December or January. If I have too much mulch, not as many sprout and grow. However, due to the lack of mulch, I have to get out there in winter and pull the winter weeds and get them out of there while they are small and easy to remove so that the weeds don't crowd out the poppies and larkspur.

Leaves that are whole and intact often can take a couple of years to fully decompose, and the drier they stay, the longer it takes them to decompose. Leaves that have been chopped up or run through a chipper/shredder can decompose in a matter of a few weeks. So, if you have bags of whole leaves, as long as you leave them some air holes in the bag, they may still be mostly whole by spring, especially if you store them in a shady area where the sunlight does not shine directly on the bags and cause them to heat up, which would speed up decomposition.

Dawn

The conundrum with composting, is in the summer ,when I have greens galore from grass clippings ...... I have few browns.

Now , I have plenty of browns, but my lawn is not producing any greens :)

My plan for these , was to use maybe half of them on the compost pile with my spring grass clippings. And the other half I thought I would till into my garden in early Feb.

I'm sure they are entirely leaves, they are from Bradford Pears, and just for funzies, I used Google maps to get a picture of the trees they came from, it was these along SW 119th in OKC

If you want to keep composting in the winter but lack "greens", most Starbucks will give you their used coffee grounds for free. They even have them bagged up for you. Even tho they look brown, they are "green" & if you mix them with your chopped up leaves you will get compost eventually.

I hope you don't get Bradford Pear trees instead of mulch.

I never have the proper ratio of greens and browns, I just beg, borrow, and steal all the organic matter I can and it seems to work out. I hauled at least 6 yds. of shavings this week ( use those around the border of my beds) and if weather permitting I will haul a couple yds. of shredded leaves next week. I almost never turn down the free stuff. My biggest problems have been Poke weed and grub worms.