Wood Chips!

[baymule]

We use the tractor front end bucket. LOL

 

[Ridgerunner]

My general cycle with wood chips in Arkansas was to use them the first year in landscaping beds. I also had a walkway through one side of the garden so I could walk when it was muddy and I surrounded two sides of the garden with a walkway of landscaping cloth covered with wood chips. I used those garden fences to grow climbing things like pole beans, cucumbers, and tromboncini squash. That helped keep the weeds and especially grass away.

The second year I'd take them up and replace them with fresh wood chips. The ones I took up were mostly rotted so I had good compost. I would pull up the landscaping cloth from one end and it was pretty easy to separate the wood chips and compost by hand. I could usually reuse the landscaping cloth once but after that it had so many holes in it that it was better to replace it rather than patch it. I used the wood chips that were left in my veggie garden as mulch over newspaper. By the next year they were practically all gone. I'd turn what little was left under in the spring before planting.

I'd get them from a nearby city, Fayetteville, or a utility. There was not telling what kind of trees those chips were from or how they may have been sprayed. I was OK using them in my landscaping areas and next to my veggie garden, but wasn't that comfortable with them in my veggies until they weathered a year. I'm immune to poison ivy and poison oak so that was not a worry. I did get some seeds, usually trees I considered trash trees, but those were pretty easy to handle as long as you didn't let them get established.

Wood chips are more problematic living down here in the city. Part of that is logistics of getting them, part is that people are so worried about attracting Formosan termites there is no market for them. I'm trying pine bark in some areas and what they call pine straw in others. Pine straw is just pine needles, but really long pine needles. I'll see where I go from here.

 

[flowerbug]

We use the tractor front end bucket. LOL

i'd love to be able to do that! unfortunately we're way beyond having open access to any part of this part of the property. it's all be decorated, gardened, hardscaped and all done without much thought as to what might happen later that might need access. as it is even wheelbarrowing must at times involve a rather zigzagged path to get to where i'm going...

as an example. the fenced gardens where i'm doing one project right next to the ditch/pallet project. if the fence had a gate in it on that side i could be moving wheelbarrows all of 20ft instead of the 100+ft i'm having to go now.

 

[Carol Dee]

wow How nice they remembered you and continue to drop of loads of woodchips. Bob would be so envious! it gets costly to have to buy more each year.

 

[Beekissed]

i'm so envious i'm going to pee green for a week!

This! Bay, you have indeed been blessed!

 

[thistlebloom]

i'd love to be able to do that! unfortunately we're way beyond having open access to any part of this part of the property. it's all be decorated, gardened, hardscaped and all done without much thought as to what might happen later that might need access. as it is even wheelbarrowing must at times involve a rather zigzagged path to get to where i'm going...

as an example. the fenced gardens where i'm doing one project right next to the ditch/pallet project. if the fence had a gate in it on that side i could be moving wheelbarrows all of 20ft instead of the 100+ft i'm having to go now.

What's keeping you from putting a gate there?

 

[baymule]

Steam rises off the piles in the cool mornings. There is a lot of green from the pines and cedars and it heats up the piles. We are thrilled to have the chips.

 

[thistlebloom]

I bet it smells delicious!

 

[baymule]

I bet it smells delicious!

It does!

 

[flowerbug]

What's keeping you from putting a gate there?

if i stay on longer term i have plans to enclose about 2/3 of an acre of space and the fence i've been putting up would be a part of that plan. until then i don't want to mess with an old fence and poles that are getting ready to fall over.