Chipper mulch

[Chuck52]

Burn piles, free mulch from the local rural electric company, things that make me think and cause my head to hurt. I have lots of dead trees and brush, and it appears this will be true for the next few years while I try to whip my little corner of Paradise into shape. I recently got a nice big pile of rough mulch free from the local rural electric company. It is a mix of sawdust-sized stuff and quite a few larger chunks that made it through the chipper more intact. While rough, it is fine for what I needed, which is to create weed-free strips containing my fruit trees, designed for ease of mowing. As for my own brush piles, I have been burning them because I have no chipper shredder and rental on one seemed too high last time I checked....I think it was $100/day. However, burning some of this stuff gets pretty exciting too, and I really could use the mulch for various purposes, so I'm re-thinking the chipper route again. I just did a search on "chipper" and found way too many posts, mostly about whether to go with a stand-alone unit or a pto unit. Is there anyone out there in ether-land who was sufficiently interested in the subject that he would/could give me a summary of the conclusions from the various recent discussions? My points of interest: 1) pto vs standalone, both price-wise and function; 2) quality of the resulting material, i.e. how to reduce the average size of the chipped material to improve it's quality as mulch. The maximum size of the material to be chipped it actually of lesser interest to me. I save for my own use, or can easily dispose of anything close to firewood sized. I guess the higher quality mulch you buy from lanscaping services is produced by some kind of grinder rather than a chipper, but how much does the size of the output vary from chipper to chipper? I have lots of places I could use even rough chipper output. For instance, there are several native pecan trees on my place which might produce decent nut crops with some encouragement. I need to clean out brush around them, and then a layer of chipper mulch would help keep down the weeds. And I could spread it in the numerous low wet areas that persist even though the weatherman assures me we have had a dry winter and are four inches below our "normal" rainfall.

Chuck

 

[pennwalk]

I have a Bearcat 554 chipper/shredder. This is a belt driven PTO unit. The chipper is a steel disk with 4 slots with blades outside the slots. The material is sliced up by the blades and falls through the slots into the shredder section. The shredder section is 36 serrated knives that chop the material up until it is small enough to fall through the shredder screen. There are 4 different sizes of shredder screen available which make chips from the size of a coin to sawdust size. The finer you want it the slower it goes and the more often it clogs up. I notice that the but end of the branches makes a nice woody mulch. The ends of the branches tend to make a mulch that is it has lots of little sticks in it. I guess if mulch was the point you could chip the good parts into one pile and chip up the junk somewhere else and get rid of it.

Chris

 

[ejb]

I went with a PTO chipper, a pretty heavy-duty one and it is one of my most useful attachments.

I have a lot of clearing to do, lots of rock walls to liberate from the woods and a lot of dead stuff to clean out, and a very short burning season, so I have found the chipper a great time-saver.

My chipper puts out chips that I wouldn't want to use in my flower-beds as we prefer the more uniform, smaller chips we can buy locally from the lumbermill, but I do use them in less visible places just to control the undergrowth and to fill-in low spots here and there...mostly I just fire them into the nearest woods and let them rot where they land.

I chose a pto unit because I didn't want to have to pay for and maintain another engine...just grease it and sharpen it and it can sit for years without any maintenance and it will always work for me...I can see some benefits to having a stand-alone unnit sometimes, like when I am using the 3pt for something else, but if I did it again, I'd buy another 3pt chipper.

If you can afford it, get a hydraulic feed; I did, and it is also a great timesaver...put a tree/limb in it and while you go get the next piece, the first piece is chipping away...makes one-man projects go much quicker.

BTW: I got a "woods" branch chipper, and have had no problems, but there are other good brands as well.