I have similar soils, alkaline clay. I also have a 2 acre lawn, over-seeded with clover. I use the clippings in the following order of priority -

1) mulch trees, flower and veggie gardens. Gives the necessary nitrogen, weed suppression, moisture control.

2) leave the clippings on the lawn to feed the lawn - I don't have a mulching mower, so this can be iffy when the grass gets too long.

3) use in the compost operation.

I do mulch into the lawn as well. I also use the clippings to mulch around trees and wherever else I find a use for them. I think maybe after I till the cover crops under, I'll layer some of the grass clippings on top. I don't have many leaves to mix in here, although if I wanted to make the effort it wouldn't be hard to import some. I also have a friend with horses and can get all the manurei want. I mix a little into my compost, but have heard it is too strong to just add to the garden directly. Could I put it in during the fall?

I use them for mulch. I used to put them in the compost, but I don't have any browns in the summer other than cut-up newspaper, so it was too much of a pain when the clippings would mat up and stink. Using them for mulch is easier for me.

Clippings do the most good if allowed to remain where they were collected. If they are too long, then either the grass is over fertilized or not mowed often enough. A lot of rain will cause excessive grass growth, too. Mowing more often is sometimes necessary.

Sometimes it rains so much, or you may be out of town, perhaps even injured and unable to mow, that the lawn gets too long to mulch the clippings back into the lawn. So you bag them and add them to the compost pile or spread them around to suppress weeds.

Throwing away grass clippings and then buying peat moss is something I see people do all the time because they have been taught, wrongly, that the grass clippings are a waste product rather than a valuable resource. Grass clippings should be recycled from where they came. mulch mowed back into the lawn where they can provide up to 1/2 the annual Nitrogen needs of the lawn, used as a mulch around plantings to help conserve soil moisture, suppress unwanted plant growth, etc., or composted. Grass clippings should never be thrown away.
Even if the grass has grown quite tall proper mowing techniques can be used to mulch mow that grass. If when mowing the cut grass clumps then the mower is moving too fast, or possibly the grass is too wet to mow. The forward speed of the mower needs to be matched to the mowers capability to process the cut grass.

I also have a friend with horses and can get all the manure i want. I mix a little into my compost, but have heard it is too strong to just add to the garden directly. Could I put it in during the fall?

Sure - its all good. It will likely disintegrate into the soil by spring.

As per all the friendly advice on mowing / mulching a lawn, all y'all are welcome to come out and help mow mine :-). The lower acre is kinda a swamp just now, what with the rain and irrigation runoff, and about a foot high, but maybe it will dry out by the time y'all show up and we mulch that back in. Or we can bale it.

"I have an abundance of grass clippings. I feed as much into my two compost bins as I can without overwhelming them, but still throw a bunch of it away."

That makes me feel like crying and I don't cry easily! Grass clippings are a great mulch and disappear quickly as the earthworms will *devour* them. They love grass clippings.

Grass clippings are also good to use on pathways in a veggie garden. They dry and make a clean surface to walk on. Gradually decompose and can be tilled in.

My neighbors will double mow their yard once a week, collect the clippings with a sweeper, then dump and burn them eventually. They're non-sociable, or I'd go ask them to dump them where I could get to them. But they use weed killer along the fence row and I'm sure they fertilize and use some kind of insect killer all over the yard, so I'm probably better off without them anyway.