Search around this board and you will find some great tutorials!
Go ahead and find some sort of bucket or coffee can to keep near the sink to collect all of your trimmings, peelings, the last of the lettuce, tips of green beans, banana peels, cucumber peelings.....getting the drift?
You can also look up you are a composting whacko if......
Then you are going to find things like dryer lint, toothpicks, deceased pets and MORE!
Let it rot! Nancy

The thing you are doing is caring enough about your compost to mix it up. Put on rubber gloves and really mix it up. Waiting three years means most of what you should be getting is already broken down and used up. You need to work quickly with a turn around of no more then 6 months. Clearly as you add new items you need to have more bins. One bin is for new items, one bin or more is for finishing half down compost, one can be for storage of finished compost. People think it's like a washing machine, put stuff in and get compost out. The more work you do, the more benefit like with anything. The more you play the piano, they better you will get. If you practice less, it's still ok, just not as good as it could be.

My plan for this is to use the finished product to help loosen up my heavy clay soil. I'm not in any hurry, but plan to add it to my beds after my plants are finished in the fall (either this fall or next).

Piling the leaves on as mulch would do more for the soil with less work than composting.

'The more you play the piano, the better you will get. If you practice less, it's still O.K., just not as good as it could be.'

This is true for piano playing but I don't think the analogy holds for compost. You can get excellent compost by putting in huge amounts of work. You can also get excellent compost by putting in almost no work at all.

I also disagree with the statement, "You need to work quickly with a turn around of no more then 6 months." You can do it that way if you like but you don't need to. This is why we get newbies thinking they are doing something 'wrong', that they have somehow made 'a mess' of their compost. In its extreme form some newbies are so frightened by the mystique put out by interventionist composters that they believe they can actually 'spoil' compost and have to throw it away. It's enough to put someone right off even starting a heap.

I agree with lazygardens - if you have a supply of 3 year old leaves composting them seems pretty pointless. I'd just get them straight out onto the garden and start composting with all the new stuff being generated daily in garden and home.

Go ahead and add the grass clippings, weed seeds and all as this will give you the nitrogen you need to get things hot. The salmon skin was fine in a bin that isn't open to critters.

Weed seeds will be sterilized if you get things hot and with enough of a hungry microbe herd they don't really care that it's a weed seed, food is food to them :-).

When I say 'hot', I mean over 150 in the middle of the pile a day after you turn it. I would also recommend turning it more often to accelerate decomposition. If you amp up the nitrogen and oxygen you get heat and speed if you keep it damp but not wet. If too wet you get mucky looking smelly clumps - more air and more dry leaves or cardboard fixes that.

What herbicides are you using on your lawn? It would be good to know that.

Definitely save your kitchen scraps and add them all. They will not sprout. If they do, it will only be on the surface, and your turning will turn under and kill anything that sprouts.

This fall, mow up leaves with your final lawn mowing for a nice grass/leaf mix. Pile it on your garden several inches thick. Just leaves are OK too but the grass/leaves mix is richer. If you have compost or even half finished compost, put that down first, then the uncomposted stuff. The worms and microbes will work it during fall and early spring. By spring you will be able to dig/till most of that in.

Also keep some leaves in a bag or bin next to your composter, and layer them with kitchen scraps all winter. By spring you'll have a batch of compost going.

Since you have one bin...well, you'll need two, or at least a second pile. Because at some point you have to stop adding to the bin in order for it to 'finish'. When it's full up, remove the bin, cover the pile loosely if you like, and start over with a new batch.

Happy composting!

Lots of responses! Per the responses, I went ahead and added some grass clippings to the pile and mixed things up. I will also pick up a small trash can for kitchen scraps, so thanks for that tip.

My main concern was not being sure if the coffee grounds and leaves by themselves that would make something useful. At this time, I don't want to put a ton of effort into it and am happy to let it take however long it will take. At the moment, I turn the pile, and water if it seems dry, once a week and add the coffee grounds whenever my container get full (about twice a week).

Lazygardens mentioned that it would be better to just add the leaves to the garden as is and we did that before planting this year. I'm thinking about doing another bed, so I may add the compost to that and so some experimenting.

Toxcrusadr, we haven't used any herbicides on our lawn for several years.

Oh, so you were just worried about weed seeds getting into the compost. OK.

Almost anything wil eventually turn to compost, and leaves + coffee grounds will too. Personally I don't turn mine nearly that often - nothing wrong with doing it, but you don't have to turn it a lot.

Definitely do that kitchen scraps thing. Coffee grounds AND filters, tea bags, all fruit and veggie scraps, and if you don't have high pH, crushed eggshells. We use a 1-gal ice cream bucket with a snap lid and handle. You have to eat the ice cream first - what a pity. :-]

Turning compost used to be my 'think time' as I derive some weird enjoyment from turning and breaking up clumps to speed things up - it's think time I guess.

Anyway, after back surgery I just don't have the spine for it any longer so am experimenting with switching from hot composting to a flow-thru worm composting setup. Will still put it through one 'hot cycle' to kill off unwelcome life forms but then instead of putting it through multiple turns I will be letting redworms and african nightcrawlers handle the mixing and finishing from now on.

If you want 'easy' composting of the stuff you are composting that might be worth reading about