Should I use fresh wood chips as mulch?

We inherited a 1978 TroyBilt 'Horse' Tiller that came with a chipper/shredder attachment. We have many trees and use a large amount of mulch we obtain from a local gravel pit and thought maybe we could chip/shred some of our own. I am wondering if it will rob the soil of nitrogen if we use fresh chips? I saw on an organic show once that they added blood meal to help break down recent chips from a stump they ground off, should I layer blood meal in the chips? Can I put them directly in my beds or should I compost them and if so how?

Compost or use for paths until they break down. I have a dump truck load out front from the tree trimmers and don't expect to be able to use it until next year.

If it's going on top of the soil it should be fine. I wouldn't dig large amounts in to a new planting bed, that's all.

Yeh, what they said! :>)

Use for paths, compost it, or use it on top of the beds as mulch (not turned into the soil).

If you want to break it down (compost it) blood meal can get rather expensive. Would be just as fast and quite a bit cheaper to use alfalfa pellets and/or fresh grass clippings to get it to heat up and start cooking. And keep it moist, of course.

Shoe.

Do the alfalfa pellets add weeds? I had used them once on a rose bush and weeds just grew up in abundance! I was worried after that!

Susan Dove

I think I saw your post about weeds & alfalfa on another thread. However, I've never had that problem and I've been using it for many years. (I'm referring to alfalfa pellets/horse feed, not alfalfa hay.)

Shoe.

and for the life of me I can not think where I asked that question in another thread........I am getting so I need to write things down......

susan

ok....found it so I am adding this edit......s

This message was edited Jul 25, 2006 11:47 PM

Ok...so what I want to use it for is to top dress all my beds and under trees to retain moisture and eventually add nutrients, naturally. I currently buy about 10 pickup loads or 20 yards of mulch per year from a local place at $20/yard, so if I can make my own it will be much cheaper and then I could not burn my limbs/branches that we loose in storms etc., but shred them......

I just am worried that it will leach nitro out of the beds. Or create problems.

darius, what will you do with the chips until then? Just leave it sit or turn it?

susan

The wood chips cannot just magically take nitrogen from the soil. If you dig a lot of them in, then yes, the nitrogen might be tied up (but not permanently depleted) for a while. Not nearly as much as if you were to turn under a great deal of green stuff. But even then, if you dig in the chips, you could add a strong source of nitrogen like old chicken poo to counteract that. And I regularly dig in small amounts of chips to give my soil better tilth and soil structure.

Now, I would be careful not to mulch w/ black walnut wood around sensitive plants.

Susan, my pile is MUCH too large to turn! Actually I have NO flower beds here at the new place so I'm thinking to get some stone to outline a huge bed on the grass in front. Then I will put down the cardboard from the boxes I'm unpacking and add 6-8" of the fresh mulch. By spring I should have plantable beds.

ahhhhh.... I am so glad you guys answered my 'silly' questions. This will be a first attempt for me but I do also have a source for wood chips from a company for free so I could compost them. I like the idea you have darius. And it will be fun to start new gardens in your new home. Did you leave behind a nice garden?

....s

Yes, I have left behind 2 wonderful gardens, different towns, different years. Started my first garden when I joined DG and had my own newbie questions!

You didn't mention what type of wood you have chipped. The aromatic woods, like junniper, eucalyptus, pine, cedar etc, have allelopathic tendencies. They can also trigger many allergies and/or asthma when fresh. Our community garden took delivery of freshly chipped junniper and eucalyptus in June to use for mulching the pathways. It was too stongly aromatic. People were having breathing difficulties, irritated eyes and breaking out in rashes. We had to have it moved away.
We also learned from the professional landscapers that even aged eucalyptus chips carry a soil borne pathogen in our state, so they never use it in gardens.

That is a good point, I also am allergic to juniper trees and cedar can also cause asthma for me, however these chips are/will be from spruce and maple trees, both of which I am ok with. But you make an excellent point because if I were to get the chips from the local tree guy I would have to be careful or could cause more problems than it would be worth!

Also it just occured to me that many people get trees cut down because of disease and what if those chips I could get from the tree guy contained some sort of disease .....hmmmmm, that could be harmful for me.

I wish I could grow eucalyptus here, what a lovely smell indeed! You must be so blessed out in CA! Any garden pics for me?

....s

When I lived in PA we were told that something called "artillery fungus" could grow in wood chips (but not bark chips). The fungus could shoot spores that stain the side of the house. Here's a link that talks about it. http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/d/d/ddd2/artillery_fungus.html
So you might not want to use them in beds up near the house or car.

You bring up a good point about disease Dove. I guess it depends on how much you trust your tree trimmer. Hopefully they would have sufficient integrity to only bring you chips from healthy trees if you ask. In this area, many trees are trimmed back or removed because they get too big or the roots start busting the sewer pipes and lifting the sidewalks. This is especially true of older homes. Our community garden recently took delivery of magnolia wood chips for the paths. This seems to be working well. The problematic juniper mulch was also infested with spider mites, which seem to have an affinity for junipers. Glad we got rid of most of that stuff.

I'm attaching a photo of our bed at the community garden. All the individual plots are 4x16 ft. raised beds. Some of them are raised a few feet high to make them wheel chair accessible. We also have some double plots without the wood frame that have been planted as food forests (permaculture fruit & vegetable gardens) for the local food banks.
The lottery for garden beds was on Memorial Day. We spent two weekends double digging (after soaking and grub hoeing the adobe clay hardpan) and preparing the soild and finally were able to plant on the second weekend in June. So far we've harvested 3 pounds of genovese basil (that became a quart of fresh pesto sauce), two zucchini, a large bunch of dill and parsley and a large salad bowl of full of golden purslane. My potatoes and pole beans just started blooming this week. One patch of collards will be ready to harvest in a few days. The buttercup squash vine has set six baby buttercups already. The acorn squash has two little squash and the trompochino squash are also starting to set fruit. I think I saw one eggplant fruit beginning to form tonight! It will be interesting to see how long it takes the pimentos and sweet italian frying peppers to green up. The okra also have finally started forming blossoms. They took forever to grow but finally kicked in with the past week's heat wave.

I love the idea of a community garden! The photo shows that you have been hard at work in your plot!

Ok, you have me stumped....what on earth is the white structure for and what is that fabric across the top for? I sat looking at it for a while trying to figure it out!

You certianly have a wide varitey of produce growing and are sure to enjoy the fruits of your labour soon! I have not had a veggie garden in 20+ years, but do grow some herbs, eps. basil for pesto!

.....susan

Here is where the mulch is to go....

The white structure is our greenhouse/trellis framing. My husband built it out of pvc pipe. The joints are not glued - they can be be disconnected to allow for whatever structure change we need during the growing season. In the winter we convert the overhead pieces back to the arch structure you see in the front part. The entire bed can be covered with plastic file or polyspun row cover to make a green house. The back section has been converted to trellis frame for the the summer. There is jute twine strung from the top horizontal to the lower horizontal. You can't really see the twine in the picture. That's what the squash and beans are climbing.

The white cloth is a section of Agribon floating row cover. It's tied up at the top to get it out of the way. Guess I should probably take it down and store it until fall. I was using this fabric to cover the bed when we first planted the seeds and seedlings. The row cover transmits 95-98% of the light, retains warmth and moisture (but breaths so that air still circulates around the plants). I use this early on to keep the winds from drying out the soil while the seeds are germinating. It also keeps bugs off the new transplants. It's light enough for the plants to push up as they grow. As the weather warms up, we remove the row cover during the day and tucked them back in at night until the nights remain above 60 degrees. One of the tenets of square foot gardening/biointensive planting is to protect your plants while they are getting established. We has Wall O'Waters around the eggplants and peppers for a few weeks in June to get them going.

Well, it sounds like you make the most of your plot of land. I think that is very cool! I have never heard of biointesive planting. But I have seen community gardens and it takes dedication to be invovled in such a venture! It looks like you have a nice one going there and that you get alot of produce and enjoyment from your space.

I think that this use of pvc is a good one. You can move it around to accommodate many different needs throughout the season. I like the idea of using it for a greenhouse and then a trellis! I may steal that one!

Susan

Mermaid, it looks great. I guess this is sort of the Jeavons method; I do a modified version myself. What are you getting for fertilizer/enrichment? Manure, or are you composting the stuff yourself?

Zeppy,

Thanks for mentioning the Jeavons method, I was able to google him and this is wonderful information. The article that I first read brings up a great point in sustainability gardening here in the USA. They point out that we are loosing the skills as we become more dependant on our grocery stores etc. making us more bulnerable to terrist attacts to our food chain. I had said I would never do vegetable gardening but now I am reconsidering my 'never' position!

.....Susan

we just had a tree chipped uptoday - large pine - thry told me do not use it for3-6 months