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Soil, Compost & Mulch

Aged wood chips for compost

12 years ago

There is a large pile of wood chips near where I live. It has been there for years. It appears if a person dug in to the pile there would be a lot of composted chips. The pile must be five feet high, six or eight feet wide and about twenty feet long. Would this make good compost for a garden?

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Comments (3)

Kimmsr
12 years ago
Maybe. If the wood chips are well digested and what you remove looks like good soil with no hint of the wood chips and smells like good rich earth I would consider using that material in my gardens.
borderbarb
12 years ago
In general, I think that wood chips are great for mulch [which in my climate turns into compost in just one season]
But that is when the chips come directly from tree service.

If you don't know where the chips in that large pile came from, before they were piled there, you might want to see if seeds will sprout and be healthy in this material. Are there weeds/plants growing at edge of this pile?

With all the witch's brew of chemicals in common use [& ignorant mis-use], there is just no telling any more what may be in found materials. The variables of risk-taking depend the size of your garden and ability to isolate uncertain materials to check for suspected bad stuff.

I had a bad experience with found OM that introduced grubs into my garden ... took years to get rid of .... so I now look carefully at any "free" materials. "Once bitten....", as they say
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I have a 1 year old woodchip pile to which I randomly add coffee, kitchen scraps and human urine. The one observation that might be helpful is that even though I let rain fall on it, and occasionally water it, very little water actually penetrates into the interior of the mound. I can have mushrooms fruiting on the surface of the pile, but there are dried eucalyptus leaves in there virtually unchanged after a year! Of course, Euc has some oils that prevent breakdown, but the leaves compost fairly quickly on the surface of the soil where they get water. Sooooo, if you want your chips to compost quickly, find a way to make sure the interior gets a good soaking every once in a while, and you are going to have to open up the pile to do that. As for woodchips as mulch for veggies, slugs tend to like living under woodchips in the daytime. The other thing is just making sure they don't rob your nitrogen, which maybe isn't such a problem if you are using coffee grounds.
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At my last house I used wood chips on the paths between the rows of the garden. Fearing the wood chips and soil would get horribly mixed together, plus the dreaded nitrogen stealing, I put barriers such as bricks and boards between the wood chip paths and the garden rows. The next year I applied more wood chips. The third year I was going to do that again, but instead I wound up pushing around the top layer of wood chips and scooping up the LOVELY fluffy black rich soil that the underlying wood chips had become, and putting that on top of the garden rows. Then I put fresh wood chips down on the paths. I tried to mulch around my current raised beds with wood chips over cardboard, but it always rots fast and weeds grow in it. So recently I just go with cardboard, as the wood chips make it rot faster. My wood chips always seem to rot pretty fast, maybe because it rains a lot here so they are soggy a lot? I put shredded branches into my compost because we get them from our chipper-shredder and have copious amounts of green that need some brown to balance it. I do use leaves mostly, but I like to use whatever I have and the branches are from my own property and organic, and the leaves I take from other people. Marcia
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I prefer shredded hardwood mulch for flower beds. It has a nice uniform appearance and will break down and enrich the soil. As it breaks down, no need to rake up the remains-- just plan to add a new layer (usually in the fall). :Pinebark mulch is great for acid-loving shrubs like gardenias and azaleas but it's typically more expensive. If your old mulch cakes up and forms a crust, you can break it up with a rake or hoe and turn it into the soil. This happens with some mulches and also if the original mulch is laid a little too thick. Wood chip is not as good for suppressing weeds but I like it fine for tree rings and shrub borders. In the arboretum where I volunteer we use lots of both, just for different purposes. In our demonstration vegetable garden we mulch with grass clipping and straw with a layer of newspaper underneath!
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bi11me
12 years ago
I'm inclined to agree with borderbarb that a certain amount of caution is warranted. This could be pressure treated scrap from a demolition that is loaded with arsenic, black walnut, or any number of other things. Ordinarily a pile of organic matter that has been sitting for that long would be in a late stage of decomposition and would be hosting a significant amount of growth - if it isn't, I'd want to know why.

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