I would personally keep composting. Especially as your garden seems to be surrounded by the unplesant stuff, trying to protect yourself by throwing stuff away seems a bit like a lost cause. If you think the current pile heated well then perhaps you sould let it rest till spring without adding more to it. The new materials you could start in another pile so you can make sure that next spring you get it to heat up well before letting it age for use at a later date.

Good luck.

There is no really good reason to throw away any of your garden waste, it should be composted, all of it. Throwing away plants and other material from your garden is like throwing away your money, it all has valuable nutrients, some of which you cannot by at the local garden shoppe, that could restore the health of your soil.
Never, ever, excpet in the case of poison ivy, oak, or sumac or possibly a couple of other similar plants, send any plant material off your premises. Almost all of it can, and should, be recycled on site.

Thank you both for your comments. Kimmsr -- I am new to composting, but thought it was advisable to trash/destroy disease-ridden plants if your compost did not reach temperatures that would kill these organisms. Is that not the case? alliemack

mcaren,
This is a greatly debated topic. Kimmsr, myself, and many others see no good reason to throw away organic materials.

Some other people are really afraid of their compost and are likely to spend money to buy plastic bags so they can bag up their organic matter to throw away and then the will go purchase sterilized organic matter in more plastic bags to put on their gardens and compost piles. (I personally see this as silly and I can't afford it anyway.)

You have several choices of how to best compost your "diseased plants",
1-live recklessly and just throw it on the current pile.
2-Start a new pile for your diseased stuff and that way you can make sure the new pile reaches sufficient temperatures to deal with the new additions. (This way your current pile can be put to rest and ready to use come spring.) Using a seprate pile for this season's stuff will let you decide if you want to be selective about when/where to use that particular compost and you can also let it age longer.

Since you seem to be having fungus problems, corn meal might be a good addition sprinkled into the compost pile to promote good fungus that will help control the bad fungus you are having trouble with.

Again, since you say the are seems to be surrounded and teaming with these problems, throwing away some of your garden plants isn't likely to make a dent in the spore load around your garden. You are better off creating more compost that can help grow stronger plants which can hopefully withstand the problems.

Thanks Tclynx for the info. I am inclined to believe that fungi are attracted to our area like magnets, and that my ailing garden plants probably won't make a significant difference in the grand scheme of things (especially since I've seen the numbers of moldy leaves falling all over the place).

And if I'm lucky the fungi in my yard will evolve and realize that there are WAY more mosquitoes here than leaves, and will act accordingly. The fungi-laden mosquitoes will perish, fall to the ground, and fertilize my soil. Which will have a toxic effect on the Japanese beetle population -- leaving the multitudes of moles hungry and in need of new tunneling grounds.

If only...

There is ample research out there that shows that composting diseased plant tissue will aid the bacteria in developing immunities to those diseases. I correspond regularly with people all over the globe, New Zeland, Australia, Spain, Germany, Ireland, England, Rumania, Poland, Japan that tell me that when they first started gardening they did have disease and insect pest problems that, after a few years of composting all of the plant tissue diseased or not and turning plant tissue into their soil, they see much less of these problems. I have seen the same thing in my gardens, after getting enough organic matter, diseased plant tissue imcluded, into the soil diseases and insect pest problems are no longer a real issue.