Just put them in a pile, no cover. Maple leaves mat heavily, leaving layers of leaves that compost slowly. Other leaves will compost faster. This will be your fungus rich compost source, and also your brown source, in the next several months. Fungus rich compost is in many respects better than regular compost.

Yeah, leave them out in the weather to get a slow head start on decomposing. Many of us use a circle of wire fencing (chicken wire, 2"x4" mesh, whatever you can get) to keep leaves in. It can be anywhere from 2-8 ft. diameter. Compact the leaves as you fill it. If it's close to your regular compost, so much the better. Layer them with your kitchen scraps all winter and in spring you'll have a pretty good compost pile going.

I build a second bin. And a third one :)

If you layer the leaves with coarse weedy stuff, such as dead flowers and grass, they mat less.

Or just pile them up in your wire enclosure and let them make leaf mold.

toxcrusadr: You said: "compacting by rolling around in them". I hope you meant that literally because it's a wonderful image. 8-ft diameter leaf corrals should give plenty of room for a person to roll on leaves.

Claire

Tree leaves left piled up will turn into leaf mold in a few months, freshly fallen leaves have a C:N ratio of about 80:1 a bit more than the optimal 30:1 a compost pile likes. Do not compact those leaves since any bacteria at work digesting them will need access to air and compacting those leaves can compress that air out of the pile.

If the potential is there for those leaves to blow around you could contain them with some inexpensive fencing. Or maybe mulch mow any "excess" right back into the soil they came from to put back into that soil the nutrients the trees removed during the summer.

kimmq is kimmsr

I would also chop the excess leaves up with a shredder or mulching mower so they take up less space as well as decompose faster. Like Tox my house is in the middle of the woods and I have dozens of Oaks and Hickory trees dropping leaves throughout the fall and winter. I rake or blow the leaves into windrows about 6 ft wide and 1 foot tall and then run the mulching mower over them without the bagger to chop them up and then collect them with the bagger attached. They then go into one of my 6 piles scattered around the property. One warning, if your piles are anywhere close to a tree you might want to put some plastic down first to prevent the tree roots from growing up into the pile and sucking out all the good stuff. Roots also make it much more difficult to harvest the compost because the garden fork tines get hung up.

matted maple leaves, huh.... well that's definitely an issue I have. I have way too many maples in my yard.

Anyway, I am building a leaf storage bin with a wood frame and mesh through the middle, the top will be plastic (I don't want rain and piles of snow getting in like last year).

Leaves are better than compost. Chew them up a little and put them under the mulch.