All the above advice is correct. I can only offer you encouragement on a long term basis. I grew up in 6b conditions, but I didn't know what leaves were until I moved to this 2/3 acre with 10 oak trees. My street is wooded with oaks, hickory, and tupelo. At present I live in sort of an ongoing science project about how to deal with leaves. The neighbors to the left rake furiously in the evenings and weekend and bag everything. Through the fall months, they put out at least 10 bags of leaves a week, every week, for the collection truck. They fertilize their lawn spring, summer, and fall plus overseeding the bare patches every year. Fortunately, they have two young teenagers who are so far surprisingly cooperative about yard work. To the right, the new neighbor put in only one day of fall cleanup the first year and afterwards turned the problem over to a lawn service. The lawn service showed up in early December with men, trucks, blowers, mowers, etc. and worked all day and into the dark. And into the next day -- all of the next day. That was the first year. The lawn service now schedules 3 leaf cleanup days -- Oct., Nov. , and Dec. --for that yard. They haul away a huge truckload of leaf debris each time. They also do the lawn fertilizing, reseeding etc. and work on the bare patches. In the middle, we do as you are doing. We rake, blow, mow, mulch mow, run the yard vacuum, fill the compost pile, heap shredded leaves on the garden beds, etc. Managing a lot of leaves is a big job, no matter how you do it. But...here's the benefit of doing it the way you are doing it. There is a gradual improvement of your soil and your garden beds over the entire yard as a result of the organic input from the leaf process. You can experiment with how much lime or other amendments you might want to add, but you won't need as much of anything as you would if you were just getting rid of all the leaves. Grass just plain grows better in deeper, looser soil, as do shrubs and perennials. My neighbor asks me what I put on my bare patches. Actually, at this point there aren't any. Even after drought, the lawn tends to come back. We give it alfalfa pellets in the spring and that's all. Not a showplace lawn, but a practical I guess there is a second benefit from coping with the leaves the way you are doing it. You may find that you are developing a more optimistic outlook about the whole process by thinking of the leaves as a garden resource rather than as an endless cleanup problem.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to help me! I ended up getting everything stabilized and they are mostly back to normal. I had a few things which all contributed to the edema issue and then a period of over watering after transplant. As I said, the big closet they are in gets pretty warm and humid due to the door being shut to keep the cats out. I had a fan on them and with the furnace running, it was keeping the room cooler and keeping the humidity down. After transplant, I did a heavy watering. For the next 5 days, I didn't run the fan and it has been warming here, so the furnace hasn't been circulating the air to keep the room cool and to remove the humidity. I think this caused the edema and the lack of water evaporation which caused the wilted leaves from the wet potting soil. After I figured this all out, they all stabilized and are looking much better. With the nicer weather, time for them to start transitioning outside. Still 4 weeks to go. Next year, I will be waiting 4 more weeks to start the seeds. They are getting too big, but I had spring fever. :)

I found an article with photos and I think it’s “edema ” I just have no clue how to treat it because it’s caused by humidity or overwatering which I haven’t been doing that, I’m a once a week waterer or infestations. I did spray before bringing them inside with Wilson’s bugx. I also wiped the leaves down with isopropyl alcohol 2 weeks later. Maybe it was the alcohol but I read that can kill the bugs. I’ve never dealt with a more fussy plant in my life than these lemons. I’m kind of hoping my trees don’t go dormant right now they’re flowering like crazy with new shoots and leaves. They seem to like the grow bulbs. It’s a ge flowering spectrum grow light. Thanks for any help.

I hate to see you spend money on materials, but yes, it would heat it up, I think. Don't let Starbucks discourage you---I don't think they will; they advertise about their "green-ness". I find it helps if I stand aside and wait until they ask if they can help me. Then I say, "I'm a gardener. I wonder if this is a good time to get some grounds." I say that, because often they have a trash can ready to be emptied. Warning: I never get glass or trash in my Starbucks grounds, but some people have. I don't know about mice. I've never really seen them in my piles, but they're definitely around---building straw nests in plant pots in my shed, and they filled a empty bee hive, stored in my old chicken house, with insulation. Water makes an inhospitable environment for them. I think people attempt to discourage them by keeping the pile damp. You can make nice compost using just the feedstock that your wife is comfortable with---or you could mention old_dirt's blue gills, which might make some fruit additions seem like a happy compromise. Pumpkins can generate a lot of heat, but squirrels like them, so they'd probably attract mice. I once read that yarrow was a compost accelerator. My compost pile is just where I put stuff that doesn't have to go to the landfill, so I have some piles that don't heat up, but they still produce compost in a year. My leaf piles take longer, but are well worth the wait. I really, really like to make compost, so I'm willing to be a little more eccentric than most people. Your kitchen sink gray water is a source of water that could be captured and put on your pile, if you don't mind slopping water through the house.