Sounds just like my yard...five oak trees and two pines on a little
less than a quarter acre!

Fortunately my yard slopes steeply toward the street, and our town
collects leaves at the curb for recycling...so the front is relatively
easy. More than half our leaves get picked up by the town. The rest we
grind up in an electric leaf mulcher, which grinds the leaves into fine
pieces. We use some of this to mulch the garden beds and rhododendrons,
and put the rest in a compost bin or off in the back of the yard where
they can decompose on their own. Once the leaves are ground up, they
turn into compost relatively quickly...we use the compost from the
previous year to top-dress the soil in the fall (before putting on the
mulching layer).

So far this has worked pretty well, although it is A LOT of work doing
it ourselves, and I imagine our soil is quite acidic. We just look for
plants that like shade and acidic soil conditions for our garden.

Someone mentioned adding soil to the compost pile to speed up the
process...I think that is very important. Anything 'green' helps as
well...kitchen scraps, a few grass clippings, etc.

Hope this helps...good luck!
cewolf

I live in the Boston area and I have about 5 oak trees and two
pines.
I get a lot of leaves and I recently contracted a guy to move all
of
the leaves to the rear corner of the yard. $300 for probably 1/2
day
work. Everything is expensive in the Boston area. Anyway, it would
be
very costly to have the leaves carted off to the dump. The yard
slopes
away form the house and it would be cost a lot more to remove the
pile.
I would like to add something like lime to speed up the
decompostion.
Is this a good plan? Is there any other beter way to speed up the
proceess. There will be a huge pile of leaves and it builds up
every
year.