suggestion for leaves in soil: Next year, resolve to shred before you add them.

Suggestions for seedling maples:
1. Resolve not to repeat the plant-a-jillion-seeds next year.
2. Rake or pull the seedlings as you see them, perhaps weekly. If you leave them be, you will have a forest.

Bottom line: Gardening is a live & learn sort of thing!

Too much meat, not enough potatoes spoils a meal.
I cant tell just how much leaves you have but evidently in the space you gave them, there was just too much of them to effectively break down fast enough.
Why not remove some of the leaf mold you have, bag them and treat the leaves as separate entities. Poke holes in the bags to let the worms in. In the spring, and probably more toward summer, the leaves should be in better shape to add something to a garden.
Now with all that organic matter and nitrogen from, I assume, added grass clippings and other organics, the pile should begin to work toward finished compost.
Don't even consider using unfinished compost in a garden.

Finished compost should smell and feel earthy, crumble through your fingers but, when squeezed in the palm of your hand, feel damp enough to form a ball.
If it still has visible signs of composting material, its not ready and should be returned to the pile.

If you are contemplating a vegetable garden, look up your individual vegetables for how compost is welcomed.
Compost, for the most part, is high in nitrogen and some vegetables resent very much such high values of this element.

To speed a pile up takes a lot of different things that might prevent it from doing so.
How wet is it. Too much water will cause odours and slows down action.
What sort of sunlight does the pile receive. Too much sun causes the pile to dry out maybe quicker than you count on and needs constant turning to bring the dampness up. You may feel you need to water the pile more.
The stuff you put, leaves...do you chop them up good. A lawn mower is the ideal tool but in enclosed spaces, a chipper or a weed whacker might do the job. The smaller you make the additions they will break down that much faster.
Fertilizer--the lawn type, can be added to hasten break down.
As material breaks down in the pile, nitrogen is used. Adding fertilizer, high in nitrogen, takes up the slack.
Turning can add air--but turning too often displaces the air. Turning about every 10 days, two weeks is quite sufficient. Less turning if the pile is in a shady spot.
Wind. If the pile is in a place where wind is constantly a factor, then it can, like the sun, dry out the pile quicker than you want.
The location you put the pile you can see is a major factor.
Worms do not like a place where it is always wet. Like after a rainfall, they come out of garden or lawn and you see them on the driveway.
There are some worms that are said to be better for the garden and compost. Red wigglers--if you care to purchase, are the ones that do a good job.
But your garden variety probably is quite good enough.

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Worms dig coffee grounds. Get some from your local coffee shops, donut shops, etc. Coffee grounds also have a lot of nitrogen to mitigate your nitrogen draft issues.

Seeds - hot compost your leaves next time then add the compost to your bed. The heat will kill off most if not all of the seeds. At least if the soil is good, the sprouts will be easy to pull. Like voting, weed early and often.
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In your situation, I would leave the new garden bed alone, just as it is. I would pull the seedlings that spring up, every two weeks or so. But that's all I would do. The bed should be ready for planting in the spring of 2011. If you want to be double certain that it is ready, then you could apply a water solution of nitrogen fertilizer several times over the summer, maybe once a month. But I don't think this is really necessary. The bed just needs more time.

1) Whether earthworms would be active in your soil would depend on what the soil temperature was and how fast the leaves would be digested in that soil would also depend on that soils temperature as well as the availability of Nitrogen to feed the soil bacteria, which is also soil temperature dependant.
2) If you are tilling your soil there is no real need to be concerned about those Maple and Elm seedlings since tilling will kill them off.

Mixing or layering leaves and soil would not be considered composting by most of us. Depending on the type of leaves, and if they were shredded first, they might take many years to break down. Until the leaves were broken down, they would take nitrogen from the soil, away from crops that were planted.

You could add freshly cut grass into this mix to get things going in a much shorted period of time. Also manure, coffee grounds, and fruit and veggie wastes. But fresh cut grass clipping are widely available, and less likely to smell than some of the other materials mentioned.

Leaves are carbon rich (browns) and they need nitrogen rich (greens) to decompose.

You've got the carbon, what you don't have is the nitrogen. Mix in some nitrogen rich things to get those leaves decomposing.

Nitrogen rich things readily available are typically coffee grounds, veggie kitchen waste, and urine. Your plot is big enough that you may want to scrounge grounds from a coffee shop.

You could also purchase (cough, cough) blood meal, alfalfa meal or manure and work that into the soil to help decompose the leaves. I hate to suggest purchasing anything... but if you want to plant in this plot this year, you are going to need to get things cooking in a hurry.

Ditto all the nitrogen comments (coffeegrounds, etc.) What I would do is gather all the coffeegrounds and seaweed I could get my hands on, and then borrow/rent a small Mantis (or mantisesque) tiller and mix your new additions into your garden while also mixing (and somewhat shredding) your leaves and soil. If you add a bunch of other nutrient sources to your soil (like coffeegrounds and seaweed) you might be able to get by this year by planting larger, more developed, transplants into your garden. Things might not grow as well as you would like, but a so-so garden is better than none at all. And next year, your soil might be exceptional, which is a great thing to be looking forward to.

I also ditto all the nitrogen comments, but i think you should be able to go without tiler if you have worms in your garden.
I made a similar mistake when i moved to new house and started gardening. My friend helped me to fix things.
Using his advice, I got coffeegrounds, veggie/fruit scraps from market and produce department, chopped them and mixed just into upper layer of my veggie bed. Then i sprayed whole veggie bed with a good amount of coca cola and other sweet things (leftover from the kids party),covered with newspaper (to smoth any seedlings) and fine bark mixed with grass cuttings on top of newspaper.
In spring i just made holes for my seedlings, added a little bit of finished compost and transplanted. At first i fed my seedlings with manure tea, later in summer they were fine without additional feeding.

Leaves have a C:N ratio of between 40 and 80 to 1, fairly close to the optimal C:N ratio of 30:1 so leaves should not be considered a carbon rich source of material since they will almost compost on their own with no additional Nitrogen added.

Other thread about nitrogen deficiency using incorporated leaves.

Lloyd

Thanks for all your help, but as it turned out I didn't really need it. I have been digging my garden for three months now, twice a week, and all the leaves have turned into soil. About two weeks ago I added two bails of peatmoss, and three bags of steer manure and dug that in approximately eight to ten inches deep. Then I started planting onions, radishes, carrots, and beans. They are all growing fine. I think next week I will plant my tomatoe and pepper plants. As for the baby trees, I just pull them out as I see them growing. I think that I have just about licked that problem as well.

Glad to hear the leaves did their thing!

I am no expert, but it is my understanding that you should be careful with manure that has not been composted and vegetables for the table. In general, I think it is safest to use composted manure. I have read that if you will not harvest any vegetables for 90-120 days, then using uncomposted manure is ok. I suspect others can and will weigh in on this.

Thank you for the follow-up. I have a neighbor who tills his leaves into the soil every fall. His gardening style seems to work fine.

You might want to test your soil for NPKpH to see what amendments are actually needed. But you might discover that it already has enough of everything needed. Just keep adding leaves. Oh, and use a mulch.

"Don't even consider using unfinished compost in a garden" huh??

And leaves/soil layer isn't composting?

Leaves need nitrogen to break down?

Who turned out the lights in here? Sheesh!

Unfinished compost is a little rough, so what? Nature isn't perfect. Look up sheet composting. It's not a compost PILE, sure, but it sure as heck IS composting.
And I've seen plenty of woodlands with drifts of leaves that decompose to leaf mold, wonderful stuff - and nary a blade of grass or nitrogen source in sight.

Different strokes, peoples.

Guess I better go have a beer now.

I think we have to be mindful of the different interpretations of "composting". Not all "composting" is the same using the same microorganisims and some different methods of composting have differences that can kill some plants.

Some explanations here.

Lloyd

>>"Don't even consider using unfinished compost in a garden" huh??

Where was that actually said? Perhaps I overlooked it but all I saw was a caution about using uncomposted manure.

blinkmyster .... said "About two weeks ago I added two bails of peatmoss, and three bags of steer manure..."

Do you mean bale as in bale of hay, or bail as in bucket? 2 bales in that small a garden space seems like a lot to me. 2 buckets seems about right.[but then I garden in clay, and I note that you have sandy soil, so maybe the larger amount of peat is called for.] Sounds like you're going gangbusters with your garden!

Did you mention introducing earthworms into your garden? May I suggest you start a small worm 'pit' somehwere in or near the garden...populate with composting worms, feed aged animal manure, kitchen scraps, etc. cover with wet cardboard or piece of carpet, keep moist and let the wrigglers do their thing. Have you seen the 'trench composting' links from another Canadian?

Glad your composting leaves problem was resolved.

Here is a link that might be useful: Vermicomposting trench