Wood chips for compost?

We recently had several ash trees come down in a storm removed and the stumps ground up. There are quite a few ash wood chips left in the ground, filling a whole about 3 feet deep and five feet across where the stump for one tree was...

What can we use these wood chips for? Any ideas?

The landscaping company told us to replant grass in the spot we will have to remove all of them from the whole and replace with soil/topsoil...that they would kill any grass planted over the top of them...

But can't we use these chips in some sort of planting mix and put the rest on an improvised compost pile with fall leaves and use next year for soil amendments.

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks. t.

They will take a long time to compost. Why not use as a mulch, where they will take a long time to breakdown but that is good for a mulch. Al

Mixing the chips with leaves alone will likely not be composted enough to use next year. You might be able to compost these chips a bit faster by mixing in a large quantity of greens and fresh manure but it will still take some time.

If you leave them in the hole and put some soil over it, I don't think the chips themselves would kill grass growing over it. Until they begin to decompose though, I think you may have a problem with ground moisture since it will drain rather quickly. Of course when they do rot, they also will settle, eventually leaving a good-sized depression in your lawn.

Wayne

Thanks, your advice is most helpful. I suppose I will take them out and use them for a mulch in some of my garden beds...and then rebuild the hole with fill dirt and top soil. t.

Interesting comments. I have a similar issue, only for me it is sawdust. Do you think sawdust would compost quickly in a varied mix of kitchen cuttings, garden leftovers, leaves and such?

i think it would, but i don't think you can use certain types, walnut, cedar, i'm not sure. debi

No, sawdust will take a long time to decompose also. You can hurry it up a bit with the addition of LOTS of green stuff or just nitrogen sulfate farm fertilizer(33%) mixed in well and some moisture (but not enough to make it soggy) added. You will need to till or turn it every couple weeks to hurry the process. Otherwise figure on 12-24 months for sawdust to become good dirt. Even then it may be hard and compact dirt. Remember, it is wood to begin with and will have the same basic texture when it is rotted.

that's good to know, thanks! debi

I use urea (another nitrogen fertilizer) and scrap sugar to speed up the decomposition of fine woodchips in a compost pile.

MM

thanks for your comments about sawdust. I'm not sure what scrap sugar is, though.

Ohh...lot's of ideas here for my stump holes....think now I'll try the nitrogen fertilizer treatment on some of them.

Thank you for all the advice.

Renfrodiana,

Scrap sugar is just any old sugar you don't mind using. I buy the cheap grade of sugar from Wal-Mart. Occasionally my wife has some sugar that got damp and lumpy and she doesn't want to mess with it. Some farm stores sell powdered molasses for adding to cow feed, and that should be cheaper yet.

MM

Several years ago a neighbor had to remove a mature blue spruce in late August. I asked her if the tree company she hired would leave me some of the chips on our driveway to use as mulch. I left for work. When I came home there had been an apparent miscommunication. The tree company left the entire 40ft+ tree in chips piled at the very end of my driveway! I Ihad to think fast just to get my car in the driveway. What resulted was the best raised mound bed I have ever had and still have. Borrowing neighbors and wheelbarrows we trudged all the chips into the back yard . We piled the chips in a kidney shaped bed about 24 inches thick. The next day I ordered top soil (delivered into the back yard because my back was shot from the activities from the day before.) The bed was roughly 20x20. A six inch layer of good topsoil was placed over the spruce tree chips. I added triple superphosphate and potash to the topsoil as we covered the wood chips. I let this this sit and cook for the fall and winter. The next spring all had composted by about two thirds. There were a few visible spruce needles and lots of small wood chips and some small limbs still showing. Because this was in the shade of large oaks I planted hostas, ferns, a Japanese maple and other shade perennials and used a modest amount of extra nitrogen to offset nitrogen loss from the still composting material. The bed wound up being about a 1 1/2 ft deep at the center and very fertile. I don't recommend this as an impromptu project. It was hard on the back and the wallet. The top soil was expensive. But all in all I love it to this day.

snapple--what a resourceful (and energetic) gardener you are! A good and encouraging story too!

So I went out and bought some high nitrogen fertilizer, some top soil with mushroom compost and pea gravel and some super phosphate and we have been working on hauling, mixing and leveling the de-stumped area into a nice bed for next spring, I hope... :-) didn't add sugar, though!

Thanks again, everybody! t.

helpful info. thanks MaineMan for info about sugar and molasses. Does anyone recommend buying a chipper?

Renfrodiana,

I recommend buying a chipper if you have a considerable supply of wood to chip. This property has 3.5 acres, over 2 acres of which is heavily wooded. There are lots of old brush piles and new brush piles building as we prune the lower limbs of the trees and remove unneeded trees, damaged trees, and dead trees.

Last year I filled two compost piles with garden waste and weeds and four compost piles with chipped limbs, deadfall, and leaves. We have a heavy fall of leaves now and I have been busy the last few days shredding the leaves through a ¼" hammermill screen in my shredder. I also put a bunch of eggplant vines through the hammermill blended in with leaves. I also have ½", ¾", 1" screens and a 1½" x 3" oval-holed "bar screen" for wet materials. The different screens let me make various textures of products from very fine to very coarse.

Finely ground woodchips and finely ground leaves decay fairly rapidly in a compost pile because they have so much surface area. And the fine texture helps the resulting compost mix easily with the soil as an amendment.

I use a MacKissic 12PT-9 chipper which can chip 3½" limbs and has a hammermill shredder section with 24 free-swinging hammers. Here is an "x-ray" view of it, showing the hammermill screen. Hover your mouse pointer over the lower righthand corner to reveal an expander icon to view the picture at full size, which makes the text more readable.

http://www.mackissic.com/consumer/images/consumer%20images/chipper_shredder_consumer2_img.jpg

This is what my MacKissic 12PT-9 looks like in a normal view:

http://www.mackissic.com/consumer/images/consumer%20images/12PT-studio-tow%20bar.JPG

It has been superseded by the 12PT-10 which is basically the same machine with a 10hp Briggs&Stratton Intek engine instead of a 9hp one. You can find out more about MacKissic shredder-chippers by exploring at these web pages:

http://www.westsharpening.com/mackissic-shredders.html

http://www.store.yahoo.com/dolphinope/migmac12chip.html

But, like I said, you would need a decent supply of material to chip and shred to justify the expenditure for a chipper. If you have a number of trees, you probably will have the material in the form of fallen leaves, limbs, and prunings. A hammermill shredder-chipper can work a magical transformation on whatever you put through it. I enjoy using mine.

MM

Sawdust works welll in compost for me. I have numerous saw mills in my area and compost in twin drums. I mix 50lbs of alfalfa and a like amount of sawdust (usually oak) in the barrels. Wet it down real good and add 3 are 4 bags of grass clippings as they come available a few days apart. Takes about 3 weeks to turn out compost that looks like comercial potting soil.

I just posted this msg about composting but see that I said Alfalfa. I sould have said Alfalfa meal. It copost and make a awful lot of heat in the drums very fast.

I ended up screening my big-woodchip piles and burying all the chips after several months of tediously slow decomp. (Bigger Willow chips) The screened remnant was superb, though.
A tree-trimming company here uses a very sharp chipper, and what he left for me was like excelsior in June. I added only lots of fresh grass clippings, and a few months ago I started amending and top-dressing with that beautiful stuff. Sawdust works like that.

There is something to be said about large particles in compost,
Kenton (James)