Wood chips and composting

   / Wood chips and composting #11  
One thing I might add. If you are using your chips for bedding to mix with manure, make sure you know your chip source. Some wood is TOXIC to some livestock. You can look up something like " black walnut or black locust toxicity to animals"
 
   / Wood chips and composting #12  
One thing I might add. If you are using your chips for bedding to mix with manure, make sure you know your chip source. Some wood is TOXIC to some livestock. You can look up something like " black walnut or black locust toxicity to animals"
Cedar can also be noxious to lungs as well as a carcinogen... including in humans.
 
   / Wood chips and composting #13  
anything that will go thru my 16" Vermeer and gets chipped goes in the dirt to rot. If you leave it on top it takes longer but will work.---spread it med. thickness, plow under 18" deep and good to go! Mixing green material and manures does wonders to speed up the process.
I add a lot of commercial fertilizers to it as well to offset the N lock that they claim happens with wood chips. I still dont believe it but i am no chemist! lol!
 
   / Wood chips and composting #14  
anything that will go thru my 16" Vermeer and gets chipped goes in the dirt to rot. If you leave it on top it takes longer but will work.---spread it med. thickness, plow under 18" deep and good to go! Mixing green material and manures does wonders to speed up the process.
I add a lot of commercial fertilizers to it as well to offset the N lock that they claim happens with wood chips. I still dont believe it but i am no chemist! lol!
Commercial fertilizers, most of them, are salt-based chemicals that kill everything in the soil. Better to collect your urine and use it. It's 18% nitrogen.
 
   / Wood chips and composting #15  
Commercial fertilizers, most of them, are salt-based chemicals that kill everything in the soil. Better to collect your urine and use it. It's 18% nitrogen.
I keep hearing that. Yet my soil was so stagnant that I never saw an earthworm for the first 15 years that I worked it, so I had to do something to make things grow... and that was before I had the entire 2 acres stumped, taking the first 6 inches of topsoil with it. Miracle Grow was my friend for years. I am just starting to see worms now, and I put in my first garden here in 2002.
 
   / Wood chips and composting #16  
worms, toads, frogs, unknown bugs,--you name it I got it in my high fertilized 4.5 acre garden! Always have had them and the wood chips and compost dont seam to hurt anything.
 
   / Wood chips and composting #17  
Me wonders how much nitogen is in 5 gallons of human urine....even though that's a lot of pee to collect...? Yet I don't mind releiveing myself in the garden now and then. :rolleyes:
 
   / Wood chips and composting #18  
Me wonders how much nitogen is in 5 gallons of human urine....even though that's a lot of pee to collect...? Yet I don't mind releiveing myself in the garden now and then. :rolleyes:
I've noticed that if I take a whizz on the lawn, the grass turns a very deep, almost blue-ish green color a few weeks later.
Great deer deterrent around my wife's flower gardens too!
 
   / Wood chips and composting #19  
Me wonders how much nitogen is in 5 gallons of human urine....even though that's a lot of pee to collect...? Yet I don't mind releiveing myself in the garden now and then. :rolleyes:
Urine typically contains 18% nitrogen. Needs diluting normally to be used on plants.
 
   / Wood chips and composting #20  
I just dump mine in a pile, underneath a red cedar tree. It's also just uphill slightly from where water drain from the front lawn. That keeps it from getting too wet.

I collect kitchen non meat stuff and eventually fill an old garbage can. Then I level the compost pile and dump the garbage can and then repile the pile. In putting the kitchen stuff in, if a lot, I scoop some mulchy material from the top of the compost/mulch pile and put it on the kitchen material I just put into the garbage can.

Makes compost in around 6-9 months.

Top tree greenery plus chips will make it cook pretty readily.

Been doing mine since 2000. Used to get a lot of leaves and chopped them up to add to it, but my leaf source dried up. Getting lots of wood chips with some tree top material and that kitchen stuff.
Are you using a chipper or shredder to produce compost? If your using a chipper, which make and model.

I want to make compost but my Wallenstein 4" gravity chipper produces very large chips that will likely take years to break down enough to use as compost. It also produces a lot of small twigs and a lot of the small branches (with needles) get spit out whole. I have tried spreading the chipped material out and running over it with the brush hog and that certainly makes the chips a LOT smaller but it involves too much time and effort. I would prefer a once and done approach.
 
 
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