freshly chipped wood - what do you do with it?

[Tania]

I have an opportunity to get about 8+ cu.ft. of free fresh wood chips (fir, or cedar, or alder, or - they say they have them all )

What is the best use of these? Should I compost it first and use as mulch next spring?

Any gotchas I should be aware of?

Any advice is appreciated

[dcarch]

I wonder if you can grow mushrooms with those wood chips then use them for mulch/compost

dcarch

[clay199]

fir is best for garden, pass on the cedar hemlock mix, bad for garden

[Tania]

Originally Posted by clay199

fir is best for garden, pass on the cedar hemlock mix, bad for garden

Clay,

why would cedar be bad but fir be good?

[Zana]

Not 100% sure, but I think the cedar would mess up your PH levels big time. But maybe somebody else knows for sure.

[dcarch]

Originally Posted by Tania

Clay,
why would cedar be bad but fir be good?

May be cedar doesn't decompose easily. That’s why we use it for shingles and posts, etc.

dcarch

[the999bbq]

as always mix brown and green and time (and some water) and you have good compost. You have the brown material in the wood chips, add the green in the form of manure, nettles, tomatoleafs,...(chop up the greens as well) mix and you got excellent material.

you could use the wood chips to reduce your grass clippings when you mow as well, just layer every container of grass with a layer of wood chips until your mowing is done - afterwards throw everything on big pile again so that everything mixes and by the nex time you mow there will be no more grass left (grass is mainly water and the water is in the wood chips)

wood chips can be used directly as mulch or on gardening paths as well where they decompose at a lower speed but that is no problem since they have another function than just becoming compost

[TZ-OH6]

My late summer tree and brush clearing project resulted in a massive pile of wood chips. The chipper man said not to use them as top mulch until they aged a few weeks, which makes some sense, but the chipping didn't get done until after the first snow, so that wasn't an issue.

Not having the needed 8 zillion tons of green matter to mix in for a good starter compost mix, I bought a big bag of high nitrogen (urea) lawn fertilizer as a substitue and added it to the pile in hopes of getting a jump on next Spring's composting.

I spread the chip pile out during some rainy weather (temps in the 40sF) to dampen it, and then I piled it back up adding 1-3 cups of the fertilizer per cubic yard/meter. That was in early December, and the weather has be at or below freezing most of the time until now.


Last week we did have a day jump into the 50sF so I stuck a pitchfork into the pile to see what was going on. The whole interior was a mass of happy white/green fungus. A passing neigbor thought I was crazy for turning my compost pile in February while snow was still on the ground! But it needed it.


The interior of another, unfertilized, chip-pile looks like the day it was chipped.


I never imagined that amount of biological activity was possible in a fresh material in such cold weather. Granted the pile was self insulating, but I piled it all up on a day that was near freezing. A far cry from optimal composting temps! It should be ready for bugs and worms to move in as soon as they unthaw.

At the other tend of the stick...I just spent the past two days relocating a pile of red cedar shrub trimmings to the burning pile. They had been sitting on the ground covered by decaying brush for about ten years. Almost all still had bark on them, and some still had their needles....tough stuff!

[bryanccfshr]

The best use of wood chips is paths and walkways or mulch in perenial beds.

[strmywthr3]

I used my chipped up branches as mulch in my flower beds. as long as you don't turn it into the soil, they won't steal all the nitrogen as they break down.

as I look out at my side yard, I see that winter has been hard on my maples and I'll have lots of fresh mulch this spring.

[Bladefan]

this guy uses it to cover his garden and orchard...

http://backtoedenfilm.com/

[brokenbar]

Wood chips, any kind, need to be mixed with manure/fertilizer at a rate of 2 to 1 (2 times as much fertilizer if it's manure.) Cedar, redwood and oak take much longer to decompose because of the high concentrate of tannin (hence, "oak tanned" leather using the tannin...) and take much more nitrogen for the decomposition to occur. Pine deteriorates faster.

If you are using commercial fertilizer/nitrogen, I do not know the ratio.
Also, if you are getting chips from a commercial chipper, they tend to be a lot larger than those run through my own Troy chipper shredder and therefore, they take longer to decompose. Wood chips will absolutely strip the nitrogen from the soil to start the decomposition process.

We got big piles from the commercial tree trimmers in Wyoming and we had them dumped on one area of one field that had alkali...it sucked it right out of the ground. Farmers in Wyoming went to the lumber mills to get fresh shavings as they neutralized the alkaline soil. (Fossil Fuels = Alkali...)

I used wood chips and shavings in my garden but they were aged at least 5 years (some 10 years.) I had plenty of space to have giant mounds everywhere aging that I could turn over a few times a yer with the bobcat.

A lot does depend on the texture. We have some first pass mulch from the local highway work they are doing. That stuff is very rough, with some limbs still 1-2ft long, and huge chunks. We used all that stuff on our tree/perennial beds where we won't plant anything else. The local mulch place won't sell mulch until they have aged it for a few months. That stuff gets hot when aging, I've seen it steam in the winter.

That being said, I love pine straw. It works well, and is easy to remove after the season is over.

[tjg911]

i would not put them into a compost pile or the garden soil as they decompose slowly and use nitrogen to do it. home based chipper shredders create smaller chips than commercial chippers that spilt out large chunks. pathways sure if you never intend to plant there but not to mulch garden plants, you'll have that wood in your soil for years. red cedar is excellent for posts, guess why - it has chemicals in it that resist rotting and can last 50 years in the ground. i got a lot of oak wood chips, silver dollar sized, and used them for mulch under newly planted norway spruce and for that they were excellent and grew nice very large mushrooms come august and september.

tom