Robert Cobb

heres what some of the muck/soil looks like




some areas are much swampier than others. I'm kind of thinking I might not want to mess with it after all. I dont think this spot has ever been part of any industrial production, but the stream at the very top of the second picture may have carried some undesirables to the area in the past. I dont really feel like getting the soil tested to make sure, but maybe I will eventually if I get the motivation.

I have an excess supply of leaves and very little nitrogen besides food scraps and garden waste that I use for my normal compost bin. What I have a lot of is swamp muck. I have a stream, and about half of the woods is mucky thick black glop that you can barely walk through in boots. I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow, but would I have a decent chance at  composting my leaves with this muck, assuming I layer it in with the leaves? Im not expecting or caring to get a hot pile, but anything quicker than leaf mould would be great. I'm in southern new england. Thanks :)

So I've made quite a bit of progress. It only took a couple weeks for me to realize how much food waste we actually have, combined with some trips to starbucks for their bags of grounds I've actually been able to get a decent compost pile going. Still tinkering with the proportions, but its been up to 130 degrees inside for a couple days now, so I'm pretty happy with my early results.
While the composition of it was probably better before, I've had to clean up my leaf mold pile because of how lazy we were with what ended up in the pile, but as you can see I've cleaned up quite a bit of it so far. Its very light and fluffy now, but no longer has junk or rocks in it.
My question now is what I should do with this light leaf mold and what I should do with the compost as it gets closer to being finished? Is incorporating the two a good idea? I would think it would give it better structure/nutrients/etc., I just don't want to make too many bad decisions if I can avoid it.
I'm a little intrigued with compost tea as well, but I don't know how motivated I am to spend money to mess around with that quite yet.

Wow thanks for the great replies. The pile isn't so far, the lot is less than an acre so it probably only takes half a minute to a minute to walk there, I'd like to keep it going through the winter, especially since southern new england winters arent really too bad these days and I like being out there when its cold :)
The sifting is mainly because we weren't so picky with what we threw in there over the years. Most of what I take out are medium to large size rocks, but I've also pulled a fair amount of plastics like plant tags and some garden twine and stuff.

We have a pit in the woods where we've been dumping leaves, clippings, sticks, and garden waste for decades now, so I want to go through it and turn it into a real compost area. The bulk of the pile is already heavily broken down, it's quite dark, but some sticks and logs remain. I've sifted some of it already, and I've made a small pile where I've been adding kitchen waste and brown leaves for the past week or so, but I'm wondering if I should bother doing it this way. I dont get a ton of waste from our kitchen, but I seemingly have an endless supply of brown leaves in our woods. I'll have some stuff from our gardens in the fall, but for now there's not much. Also I mulch the grass instead of bagging, so I dont really have any clippings until the leaves start falling in the fall.
Should I keep going using some of the existing compost like I am, or should I start from scratch with a small pile of mainly  kitchen waste and brown leaves? Thanks for any kind of tips you might have