I compost most of them. Woody stuff I usually cut up and leave on the ground for unripe wood chips. If I have a dead branch, I'll usually bury it somewhere to rot.

Many weeds get tossed under the shrub it groundcover as I go, left to compost in situation. Bulk amounts of soft material gets piled in several compost piles I keep behind a shrub here or there. Bulk amounts of noxious weeds like garlic mustard are jammed into black contractor bags snd left in the sun, hopefully to decompose enough by fall to add to the compost piles. The brush is the problem. I break up sticks as I go and leave them on the ground as much as possible. I stomp on piles of brush to reduce their volume and pike them in a kind of windrow. I realize this not helpful to you if you don’t have the space but the principle is to leave as much as possible where it is. This requires knowing if a weed is capable of seeding or rooting there even when pulled.

I compost mine. I leave them in the sun for a couple days and they die back. Then they are turned into the compost

Our city has started collecting yard waste in the old huge trash cans they have replaced with smaller ones. They are now labeled "Yard Waste" and are picked up weekly. I also use the brown paper ones sometimes. I can fit quite a lot in the bins and don't have to wrap up branches any more!

crikey duuuude ... you have 5 acres now ... just take 10 square feet .. and make a pile ... and once a month throw some horse 'nure on top ...

you dont get enough exercise with valuable work.. you just like paying for and stuffing bags????

my old pile was ten years old.. barely 4 foot tall ... and had iris... rose campion.. violets.. all kinds of things sprouting out of it ... lol ... of course.. i never turned it.. and didnt have the horses around ... you'd be amazed how a years worth of weeds ends up being an inch tall after winter ... they are 99% water ....

of course.. if you want to use the compost.. you would not throw seeds into it.. or make sure you learn how to make it hot enough to cook them.. and the 'nure is perfect for that .... especially if its barn nure with the nitrogen/urea in it ....

ken

5 acres? I wish! It's only 3... Most of the weeds come from the vegetable garden - man everything sprouts back there! Maybe I'll start with baking a small pile in the sun back there and see how that goes.

Re burn ring....I do not have to wait, how long do you have to wait?

No organic materials ever leave this property! It all goes back into the garden. Most goes on to the compost pile, but each year I'm less and less into turning it, so now I try to avoid putting things on in the first place. In the vegetable garden I have one empty raised bed where I toss everything into. Next spring I'll dig out the adjacent bed and throw the soil over to cover everything up before planting, and use the new empty bed for composting.

Weeds and trimmings in the rest of the yard get tossed onto the lawn and in a day or two (or more lol) I'll mow it all up without a bag to get rid of it, or with a bag if it's a lot and I want mulch. Branches and stuff get tossed behind a large arborvitae...

I just leave it where it is. If it's something big I'm pulling out (like some spent tithonia today) I cut into smaller pieces and leave them where they are. I don't have room for a compost pile.

I try to pull weeds before they go to seed, though. If they have gone to seed I would probably just throw them away.

Compost, except for annual weeds that do not have ripe seeds. They just lay on the ground after I pull them because I've convinced myself they're making a great contribution in that natural state.. I'm like my teenagers in the garden that way. Leave my "stuff" lying all over the floor.

kato that's a good idea, to have that empty bed right there in the garden to use as a compost area, and then rotating it. I have a raised bed in my veggie garden I was thinking of removing because it has gotten shady since I built it 15 or more years ago, but maybe I'll just use it as a compost area. I won't be able to rotate like you because of said shade, but it's a convenient area to compost it.

While I'm not lucky enough to have acres of land, I am lucky enough to have a wooded area at the back of my lot. In the woods go branches and sticks. For weeds like bittersweet or garlic mustard, or even some perennial trimmings that I don't always want to reseed, like columbines or perennial foxgloves, I let them lie in the driveway in the sun for a few days and dry out and die, and then they go into the woods as well.

Most other weeds and garden debris (dead flowers, trimmings etc.) goes in my compost bins. I say most because I have a habit (as I think many gardener do) of pulling a weed or 20 when I just wanted to go get a tomato, or go look at something in bloom, but I can't help myself and start pulling. These handfuls of weeds often just get thrown under or behind the nearest shrub, out of sight, for a little on-site composting and mulch lol.

:)
Dee

For the most part, unless a weed has gone to seed, I just allow it to dry in place. I mulch heavily with straw, so the dry weeds just become part of the mulch, to be turned under in the Fall. Purslane gets either chopped, or fermented in a bucket, to prevent it from re-rooting or setting seed.

I try to pull/dig weeds before they seed... but if conditions prevent that, those weeds are thrown onto the lawn to get mowed, or tossed into my tree line. If there are harmful insects or diseases present, those weeds go in the burn pit. Thistle or nettle goes in the burn pit too.

‘I don’t have room for a compost pile’. Are you sure? My garden is microscopic. Not much larger than my living room. But I have a no turn compost heap in a wooden bin behind a bush, although I also use the cut and dump technique.

If spring or fall yard pick up are close, it goes in lawn and leaf bags out by the street. Otherwise, it goes in the weed barrel and gets hauled to the dump (by us), or in the case of branches, wrapped in an old shower curtain for transport to the dump (keeps it contained and easy to maneuver). The exception to this is things like garlic mustard and golden bamboo roots, which go in the trash (town incinerates), and poison ivy, which gets bagged numerous times before going in the trash (great use for used produce bags and empty mulch bags). Way too many leaves to keep them all ... usually a dozen or so bags of those leave with lawn and leaf pick up ... ideally with most of the acorns ... but the ones in the woods and where they are practical as mulch get to stay.

Compost pile ... there is one, it's lovely aged compost, and there's another less aged smaller one ... we don't need a mountain, so the weeds and brush can keep heading to the dump.

If you’re sending leaves to the dump, you’re not using enough of them. Shred them with a mower, trimmer, or my favorite vacuum shredder. Disperse everywhere, as mulch in borders and on the lawn. Between grass clippings and leaves, you can eliminate fertilizing.

We dump them in the woods. We do have a small 3ft round compost pile behind the shed, but that fills up fast.

Our trees average 75 feet tall and are covered in leaves. The pine needles stay for mulch under the pines and in acid-lover beds, and the leaves from the woods stay in the woods. The heaps of oak leaves can't stay in the lilac shrubs (they're mulched with buckwheat hulls to avoid the acidity). We have a leaf mulcher, but three giant oak trees, four large hickory, two substantial maples (not counting the neighbor's) plus the 25'+ Japanese maple, a bunch of black cherries, and a variety of understory trees (dogwoods, etc.) is too many leaves to keep ...

Oak leaves do not actually make soil acidic. They would make a fine mulch for your lilacs, or any other plants, and it would save you money on bought in mulch and time and effort throwing away a useful material. “... the acidity of oak leaves does no harm to plants when they are used as mulch, nor does it make the soil more acidic than it originally was.” https://laidbackgardener.blog/2017/05/15/garden-myth-oak-leaf-toxicity/

Nor, for that matter, do pine needles acidify the soil. http://www.walterreeves.com/landscaping/leavesneedles-dont-acidify-soil/

I try to leave weeds on the ground where I pulled them. They shrivel and disappear. As far as leaves, I have mulch-mowed into the lawn what falls from my trees, and I also make tours of the neighborhoods around me to collect bagged leaves for garden mulch. If there is a point when a garden has too much organic material, I haven’t gotten anywhere close.

Martha

Interesting ... still too many leaves, but not raking them out of the hedge would be nice. Now if we could just get around to adding the lime again ...

We have had people ask if they could have some of the bags of leaves that we put out for town pick-up. They're always welcome to take as many as they like. Even with the neighbor's 50'+ hickory dead and leafless, we hardly noticed a difference in leaf quantity last year from when that tree had leaves.

I cut/pull most weeds while small and leave in place. I chop up and compost plant residues like corn, tomatoes, beans and such in situ. Most leaves get winrowed and chopped very fine by riding mower...easy method.