Chipping

I've been splitting bark from the firewood. The bark seems to stay damp longer and perhaps absorb more water than the core wood. This makes fires harder to keep burning at high temperatures -- which is important for clean burning in the stove. So I usually split the bark off each piece with a hand axe.

This makes for lots of pieces of bark. So I rented a shredder and spent four hours last Sunday feeding the shredder with chunks of bark. I learned right away that the shredder's maw wasn't large enough, nor was the shredder sufficiently powerful, to accept the largest bark pieces, so a lot of effort went into breaking the bark into pieces that were 3 or 4 inches wide.

It was warm and sunny on Sunday here, north of the 48th parallel. This made for hot, dusty work. After a while I realized that I'd better wear a dust mask. Fortunately we had some in the garage. Of course the shredder is also really loud, so I had to wear big, ear-muff-type ear protectors too. I thought about wearing goggles as well, but decided that the built-in protection at the input of the shredder was sufficient.

It didn't seem like this should be all that heavy of a job, but I must say that after four hours of working with this beast, I was pretty much ready to sit down and have a snack.

Now, however, we have a nice pile of coarse sawdust and wood chips. The green in the pile is from a couple of pine boughs that the wind had pruned from the some of the larger trees.

I figured that it wouldn't hurt anything to have some of that mixed into the chips. Here is a shot of the pile. It's probably hard to see in the photo, but the pile is pretty substantial. I've tried screening it to use coarser pieces for mulch in flower beds. This might be a good idea, but it's also pretty important to allocate time to the most important tasks. We're getting the main garden in, and I've got to build a net over the main (16' x 20') garden area to keep the crows from destroying it.

Oh, here's a close-up of some of the wood chips. You can see that we've ended up with a nice mixture of small chips and coarse sawdust. The sawdust will be a good thing to add to the worm bins for bedding. The worm bin articles say that the little worm guys like sawdust, and I know that none of this has had fungicide sprayed on it.

Since it comes from conifers, I'm pretty sure that the sawdust will tend to make the soil more acidic if we use it as an amendment. We want to grow berries and several other plants that like acidic soil, so I think this is good to have. I hope to get this bagged and stored away before it gets rained on too much.