The county is widening our road so a significant amount of trees are coming down, BIG old trees. We were lucky enough to ask what they were going to do with the chips and they said they’d dump as much as we wanted on our lot. Works out well as this property is where I’ll have a nursery bed for apples and pears I’m grafting this spring. I’ll line the nursery bed with chips and then start mulching rows for the trees to be transplanted into next year. They’re only getting started, and we still need to clear a lot of pine off this overgrown meadow.
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I want some!
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You should get some winecap mushroom spawn, too!
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This is funny…just about 3 hours ago I posted in the “Tip of the day” thread a suggestion that people contact their local city, county or state DOT and ask to be given top soil next time they have a project. Looks like you were a step ahead of my suggestion and already asked for wood chips- something else I recommend folks do if they need some. I have 6 dump truck loads of mulch by my orchard right now that I got from the city, and about 4 loads of top soil. Thanks for confirming for everyone that this can be a great way to get dirt and wood chips!
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I hope you guys have loaders on your tractors!
4 tractors, 2 with loaders! Now I’m thinkin’ we need a dump trailer…
We did something similar last spring and got about 50 loads of wood chips before I decided the mountain was getting big enough. We used some immediately, but the majority sat over the winter and we are using it now. I think letting it sit was a good idea. The piles heated up and we got some partial composting (maybe killed any wood with diseases?) We are using it now to re-mulch around our apple trees. In Colorado, it’s all about water, so the mulching helped a lot. The county trims trees along the roads every three years, so this should be a continuing source of organic material. Unfortunately, we don’t have a tractor, so a lot of it is hand labor.
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