Free Wood Chippings

[Muddy_Boots]

Hi Everyone

Hope everyone is safe and well during these bleak days with the weather being meh.

I have a project to do over the winter to keep me out of mischief whilst not much can be done, after having found a source of wood chippings for free and its basically an unlimited supply.

Will post a picture on here of the piles later but from checking what's there, there is an old pile that's breaking down quite advanced and would be ideal to be dug into my flower beds at home for fertiliser, Another pile is oldish and starting to go darker so would be ideal as mulch for my flower beds at home and as a mulch around my fruit bushes and raspberry canes to suppress weeds.
A new pile created this year which is ideal for creating raised paths with weed suppressant lining in between my three allotment plots.

This is a guy who clears gardens of trees and bushes and sells the 'good' wood but chips the rest into piles but can't get rid of it even though he has tried giving it away, people aren't prepared to collect it themselves. I only know about this as it in a field in the countryside that I have permission from the field owner to walk my dog in and the guy who owns the chippings has given me permission to take as much as I want of chippings from his piles. Result

[Muddy_Boots]

[Plot70]

Some of those are turning into good compost.
A lot of the chips we get are fir of one kind or another and are best used on paths for the first year before going on the beds.
I got some sycamore chips right out of the shredder and put them on two beds. They rotted into the soil in about 18 months.

[nickdub]

I use wood chippings as compos. I have found they take 3 years to rot down from fresh in a 1 ton bag as opposed to about 18months for leaves to turn into leaf mould. As I have about 10 builders' bags knocking around at any one time, I just keep everything separate.

Happy Xmas everyone and happy gardening

PS luckily Herefordshire is in tier 1, and also my father-in-law has just had his first anti-Covid-19 jab, so I hope we get an easier year dealign with the Pandemic in 2021.

[Right Shed Fred]

That looks great!
This autumn was the first use of my woodchip compost as a mulch. We get woodchips for free down the allotment, and I made a woodchip and fish-blood-bonemeal pile. Rotted down to a lovely rough compost. Perhaps could have waited longer but it looked good enough to me for a surface mulch.

I also use woodchips on paths. First year I used membrane underneath, but as the woodchips started to rot down and the perennials had been successfully suppressed, next year I removed the membrane before adding more woodchip on top.