PDF If you find that you have more leaves than you can compost this fall, there are strategies for dealing with the excess that don’t involve blowing it onto the neighbors’ yard while they are at work.
Not that I would know anything about that. 
The simplest is to clean the old vegetation off your garden beds and cover them as thickly as you can with leaves. This will provide insulation through the winter (not to prevent freezing, but to prevent a rapid freeze-thaw cycle that leads to frost heave) and fodder for the earthworms. I have even gone out in February, pulled some of the leaves aside and planted leaf lettuce in the soil … only to break through a snow igloo later on and pick enough for a few cheeseburgers! (Back when I still ate meat.)
So pile it on your growing beds. A foot, or even two, is none too much. A lot of it will be ‘gone’ by spring. If you till (many of us do not), till a bunch in, too. THEN pile ‘em on.
The second easy way to deal with the excess is to pile it up against a fence or other sheltered location so that it doesn’t blow away. Again, the earthworms will thank you and work hard to provide you with a large quantity of leaf mold to start spring with. Bear in mind that they will only munch on the bottom of the pile, so spread it out as much as you can.
Thirdly, why not simply mound it up as a stockpile for next summer when you will have a lot of nitrogen-rich material and little carbon-rich material to go with it?
If you can’t afford a shredder and are too lazy to make repeated runs over them with a mower, it’s okay to simply pile the leaves up whole. Nature has done without a shredder for millennia … so can you. Then, too, nature has millennia at its disposal and you probably don’t.
Shred ‘em if you can, but, at any rate, don’t let them leave your property.
In fact, I go around to my neighbors and collect the paper bags of leaves that they have already gathered up for me. The bags store well upright. I leave the tops open so water can enter and the wind has no effect on my precious leaves. Then, all summer long, I have leaves to mix with my lawn clippings.
