Madgardener wrote:

alright, it's a possible maybe. These were your ordinary trash bags of a
gray color, some were the black variety. They had laid under the deck two
years and deteriorated enough that water and earthworms had worked their way
inside...


I recommend taking them out of the bag. It's easier to take leaves out
than compost. True, you lose some by the wind blowing them away, but I
think there's a net loss of work involved...






I'm not talking commercial grade trash bags here
Dwight...........g I'm just saying yer average inexpensive garbage or
trash bag will over a year or two give up leaves and such to compost. This
isn't the first time I've had this happen to scrounged bags I didn't get to
and open up...



I guess if I read down fast enough or far enough I would see that you
followed my suggestion long before I made it. PS: a lot of communities
are now collecting leaves in paper bags for composting. They just stack
up the bags and probably use a bulldozer to move them around (areate and
uncompact them). The paper composts also.





... I
dumped over 40 orange yard bags of leaves in a compost pile in my former
yard in Nashville one fall that rose to a height of six feet and three years
later, you could dig down to a foot and find perfectly pressed and untouched
leaves. Lack of air, despite the cold weather, rains and time didn't touch
that pile in the bottom because it was compacted....


I have the same problem. Landscapers bring me leaves, which they dump
and I scrape up into a pile. They sit there a year or so and then I roll
the pile (with a tractor) to another location. That's my answer to
turning a pile 10' high and 75' long. About 25% of the time I come
across dry leaves, but the rest of it gets started composting. It takes
a couple of years this way.