Wood chips from stump grind as mulch

cant wait! i have one i bought from rolling river 2 years ago thats flowering right now. i may be able to get a few handfuls of them to try this summer.

My experience is with mesquite-based chips and juniper based chips. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with either one other than that mesquite-based chips make a particularly attractive mulch.

Like you, I also make it into growing media. The stuff around here is juniper, pinion pine and sage. Tends to be acid, especially when I break it down with Urea instead of Calcium Nitrate. So you have to check the acidity of the end product.

If I make it into compost/growing media, based on a soil test, I have to spike it with Zinc, Iron Sulfate and tiny amounts of other micros.

But basically, it’s mulch. It just sits there. It’s cheap or free.

If you have access to a pickup truck an afternoon and a convenient place to put it, by all means make yourself a politically incorrect (but odor free) compost heap. Doing so will kill most weeds and pathogens in your mulch.

Ingredients: 13 large wheelbarrows full of chips (appx. 45-60 minutes of shoveling at the transfer station.)

10-20 pounds of Urea or Calcium nitrate.

five cups Iron sulfate.

Two tablespoons of treble super phosphate (for the Nickel, not the P.)

Manganese Sulfate, Epsom salt, copper sulfate, Boric Acid roach poison or Borax and Zinc Sulfate, PRN, based on soil test of end product. Mostly they would be tiny amounts measured in a few grams.

Wet the chips as you dump them. Top load the N so that maybe 2/3 or 3/4 of the N is in the top half of the pile. It leaches like crazy especially the first few days before the pile gets absorbent, so you want to compensate for that. Keep damp, especially as the pile heats up.

Do the standard turn-the-compost-heap thing, using that as an opportunity to add whatever micros you want.

Unlike a real compost heap, a pile like that will continue to consume N for a long time. So I continue to feed it maybe 25g of N mixed in a few gallons of water (dry climate) every week for a while. About equivalent to 3 gallons of animal urine. A steady diet for the microbes.

I know that sage has allelopaths but after 140 degrees and a season in the sun it doesn’t seem to hurt anything.

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Drew!!! Thanks for posting these pictures of your “driveway farming”. I needed to see this. I recently bought twelve 1-gallon fig trees and have about 20 rooted cuttings 1 year out. Trying to figure out where I’m going to put them once they start getting bigger. The plan was to do container gardening but it was all theory until I saw your pictures.

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