Hello, in the photo you see years of dried leaves piling up in a very neglected part of my yard. Underneath a lot of leaves have already composted. There is rich nutrition there, I am sure. But you see a lot of weeks growing there. Would you still compost all these leaves or are they too contaminated from the presence of the weeds?

I compost anything from the yard except pet litter. However if you don't want to compost those leaves, I'll send you my address and you can ship them to me.

I would compost them and not lose a second of sleep over it. And I'd dream of the compost I'll be getting from the leaves.

If your compost gets hot enough - 150+F it should kill off the weed seeds.

It's generally a good practice to avoid composting weeds, mainly to avoid spreading them into your garden beds. But that looks like grass to me. If it is grass I would rake it all up into a pile and make sure it was dead before I added it to my compost.

If it's not grass, but rather some type of weed, I wouldn't put it in my compost. You won't be missing much, that much green matter won't turn into very much compost.

Henderman said:
If it's not grass, but rather some type of weed, I wouldn't put it in my compost. You won't be missing much, that much green matter won't turn into very much compost.

Thanks for your response. It's the not the green matter that i'm after. It's all the dead leaves and all the years and years of old leaves rotting underneath. I thought there is a gold mine of nutrition sitting there UNDERNEATH. But scooping all that up would add the weeds to the compost too.

I would use it. It looks like grass, that would help continue the composting. You'll be scraping off the sticks and grass, then scraping up the good stuff, or maybe
sifting them out.
If you rake off the grass and sticks, and find well rotted stuff under, that could go straight onto/in a garden, with mulch on top to keep weed seed from growing.
But yes, anytime you scrape up soil or in this case years of fallen leaves on top of original soil, you'll have weed seeds there.
It won't get to 150 degrees without a lot of help- many people don't get there with casual composting.

I guess we have our individual tolerances of weeds and views of how best manage compost.

sallyg said:
I guess we have our individual tolerances of weeds and views of how best manage compost.

Yup yup. It's all relative as to what works for the individual.

Size is pretty important for the heat to get to 150. My bins are 4' cubes and I don't have a problem with them heating up with both greens and browns. I've had 3' piles and they got hot as well but smaller than that the challenge begins. I don't really care though if I get a weed seed in my finished compost. Pulling a weed isn't a big deal to me.