The delivery trucks can’t easily make it to my house so they won’t deliver. I find sites like Craigslist or Nextdoor work great for us wanting the extra chips or for those needing to dispose of extras.
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And if there’s a road improvement project near your house the county will give you a nice little pile of chips!
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Thats one hell of a road improvement project. That looks like about 2 full days of chipping my friend, good for you! Hopefully you have a use for all that. Btw that looks like a good mix of smaller and larger material, its amazing how fast that stuff starts breaking down!
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It actually got larger after this photo was taken and two more smaller piles have been used by the veg garden and cabin. This pile will be used to line out orchard rows.
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I only have 5 trees on my small 1/3 acre lot, sounds like a great problem to have. Where are you, and what kind of trees are on the property?
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We’re on the southern edge of the Adirondacks, just north of Utica, NY. The orchard will be apples and pears, they’re still in the nursery bed until we finish clearing the lot:
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Its possible i might be sorry because i said dump all the chips you want to lol! Leaving logs in there is ok with me to as long as its just a few. I have 2 large loads of chips now but i always stockpile garden/orchard resources. I have about 20 big loads of manure and twice as much fill dirt but it all comes in handy at some point.
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All The property property pics looks nice, but the one of the orchard is my favorite! I would love to someday have property as nice as yours!
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There is no mention here that chippers are often poorly maintained and instead of clean chips are mixed with lots of long strips that are unsightly and make the material very difficult to work with- the strips stop a fork from easily pulling the chips free from the pile when you are loading them to move them.
Make sure the arborists knows you want chips and not strips!
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As Alan says, keeping the anvil sharp with sharp knives and proper knife clearance makes a big difference in chip quality. The other thing that produces nice chips is a smaller chipper which feeds wood at 90 degrees instead of a 45 degree infeed angle. Although less efficient it makes nicer chips. It’s the reason I kept my small Bandit, so I have beautiful chips for my little orchard. 
Many tree companies are not arborists, btw. And certainly the line clearing guys are not even close to being arborists. They are all about clearance and don’t even remotely care about tree health, or chip quality. Ok, rant over…
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I used to have the little estate model Brush Bandit- it had 3 blades instead of the usual two. Made the finest chips I’ve ever seen come out of a chipper. Unfortunately, it was a high maintenance machine that didn’t earn it’s keep- required a mechanic’s attention every single season- and I didn’t use it that much. It was also a lot of work lifting brush to the high hopper. But the hydraulics were awesome.
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I’ve seen artilces where people get sucked into those wood chippers. Can you imagine? I hope it was head first…because feet first …yikes.
You can get woodchips here at a big pile that the city chops up…quality is all over the place. Lots of leaves in them this time of the year.
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I prefer the loads that has plenty of leaves in it. The decomposition starts right away and therefore inoculated with bacteria even before it’s spread out. But I take any wood chip pile I can get, leaves just being a bonus.
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Years ago they use to have 2 piles here. One was ground up Christmas trees and the other was hardwoods of various types. Last time i looked it doesn’t seem like they are doing that anymore. The ground up xmas trees smelled really good.
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I’ve had an ad on that site for years with no results.
Yesterday I added the note, “$20 cash tip to driver” with immediate results.
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Apparently the chips go to the highest tipper! Still seems worth it tho.
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I’m curious about people’s current experiences with chip drop. I recently placed a request on there for a load of chips, and at the end you have the option to pay the $20 chip drop fee for the arborist. I’m wondering if one is much more likely to get chips sooner with that?
I realize it’s probably extremely location dependent. I’m on an acreage outside of town so I might not be as close to most of the work as people in town are. If it’s the difference between getting a drop in a few weeks or a few months, it might be worth it.
I remember looking at all the successful drops noted on the map at the end of last year and thinking it was just random chance that some people got drops in a couple weeks and some in a few months. But now that I actually made an ad and saw that option, it made me wonder…
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I’ve been waiting for almost a year now. Think I’ll offer a tip and see what happens.
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Someone just posted in a local gardening group that after not getting one for years, they paid the $20 fee and got one within a week. The logic given was that arborist pay chip drop $20 for the ability to find a dump place, so if you pay the $20 for them, it’s really free to them.
No personal experience. Just hearsay comments.
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If you have the room put what’s left over in a pile and let it break down for excellent compost.
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