They're woody- you need greens and shredding is more important that even with leaves.

You can hit them with a mower, dump them out, and hit them again. I have a beater mower- I put it on the lowest height setting and run it through a pile of stuff (leaves, sticks, etc) slowly- wear boots and eye protection.

Thanks Pablo but I see a few problems:

1) the neighbors wouldn't take to kindly to violent crashes as I run the mower over 1/2"-3/4" diameter rose canes.

2) the poor mower blade would be shot after trying this for 5 minutes I can imagine.

3) distribution rose thorns all over my lawn would be eventful and keep me from ever walking barefoot again.

4) probably make more of a woody mess than finely chopped mulch.

It sounds like you have a lot of these rose cuttings, so maybe it would make sense to get a small electric chipper shredder.

I have one of the above, and it works fine for small branches, but would get tiring if I had a lot to shred. It doesn't do all that well if there are lots of leaves, either.

A larger more powerful gas powered shredder would be better if you have a really large quantity of cuttings, or if you have larger diameter branches, but the good ones are pretty expensive.

You can try ebay, but I would think shipping would add a lot (the link I gave has pretty small shipping charges).

A lot of people advise against composting rose detritus - since they are the so susceptable to fungus diseases, you risk spreading pathogens if your compost pile isn't hot enough.

BUT- I regularly compost blackberries which is a cousin. If I had a fancy chopper I would use it, but you can chop it into one inch lengths with your pruners it will compost beautifully. This works best with green canes, they are really pretty soft at this stage.

I compost a very wide variety of stuff, but rose bush cuttings, sadly, I put in a brown paper yart waste bag for the town to take to the municipal compost pile. I've been pricked way too many times. The canes will rot, but the thorns seem to last forever.

Same here. I don't find they are worth the effort. I've also been pricked enough to put green cuttings in the garbage and dead cuttings in the fire and eventually use the ashes. One use for 'some' rose cuttings is to temporarily lay them over areas where tender shoots are coming up, bulbs just planted, etc. This stops squirrels from digging. Also, a few in strategic spots can stop the cat from using an area as a litter box....works well without harming the animals.

Having said all this, worse than rose thorns are stiff spruce needles that get in the compost and 'ouch'.

Thanks I'll check out the chipper from Harbour Freight. I do some rose pruning for a customer of mine and they have 100 rose bushes. I probably bring home 2 32gallon trash bins od leaves, dead flowers, and stems a week, in addition to my own rose prunings from my 20 plants.

The chipper I linked doesn't do a great job with leaves. It's best with plain branches or branches with a few leaves.

If you put leaves in, it's best to try to save some bare branches to get the chipper to take the leaves and smaller twigs. I'm not sure how to describe it, but I find it works best to keep some fairly bare branches to help take the smaller stuff through.

I would guess it would take an hour or so to go through that much stuff each week. I'd probably try to chip just the "bigger" stuff and use the greener and smaller stuff as is. Either that, or consider a larger chipper.

If you do this as a business, you could probably write off at least part of the cost of the chipper. There are some smaller gas powered machines that are bigger than the one I linked, but a lot less expensive than what I was thinking.

You might also check craigslist.org to see if you can get a deal on a used one.

I stopped composting rose cuttings years ago. Sometimes the thorns were still intact a year later. Smaller ones might break down but some of my plants had extremely large thorns. It wasn't worth the pain and risk of infection.

Karen

Karen was your pile a hot compost pile? Like 130+ degrees?

I was wondering if composting would work. Maybe I'll just burn mine to get rid of the thorns.

The last time I tried composting rose canes, I ended up with a huge gash down my leg when I turned the pile. Now I do something else with anything sharp (roses, blackberries, and fan palm fronds). I burn it down to charcoal (not all the way to ash) and then add that to the compost pile. There's a Terra Preta thread you might find interesting.

I learned the hard and painful way about rose cuttings, and their thorns, in the compost bin.

When I sifted the compost the thorns were there waiting on me...and they were still angry at having been removed from their mother.

Now, I just cut the trimmings up into small pieces and either bury them in the garden or simply toss them into the trash can.

I compost 95% of everything else that I possibly can so I figure that I'll be forgiven for tossing the rose thorns.

What is terra preta? And where can I find it?

Terra Preta is a term for dark, very fertile soil found in the Amazon. It seems to have been created by indigenous tribes centuries ago through the addition of charcoal and compost. Several of us around here have been playing around with making our own charcoal and adding it to our compost piles. There was a very long thread about it a few months back, but I can't seem to find it now. There does still seem to be another, shorter thread about it.

I have since read through that "mother of all Terra Preta threads. Still stumped how one makes charcoal or bio-char. How do you burn something but in the absense of oxygen?

Well, you could say that you don't actually burn it. You "pyrolyze" it. Heating wood drives off it's volatile compounds and leaves mostly carbon behind. This "wood gas" is very flammable and is what actually causes all the smoke and flame in an open fire. Heating in a container (in the absense of oxygen) ensures that you don't end up burning away the carbon. In an open fire, the pyrolysis is finished when the flames die down and the thick, white smoke turns to a thin, bluish smoke. At this point the carbon is being turned into carbon dioxide and will start to leave only ash behind. So it's at this point that I hose down my burn pile with water until it stops steaming. That leaves me with a nice pile of charcoal for the compost and no sharp thorns to worry about.

So you do start a fire with it and wait till the white smoke tapers off then hose it down? So I am assuming I am looking to get it to smoulder but not burn? How long does this process take and I would think if you pour water on it after the white smoke tapers off, you'd still have thorns and the rose canes would still be readily identifiable. Maybe I am missing something here.

Also how would you go about doing this safely in a backyard setting? I can't make a fire pit or anything, the neighbors would call the fire dept. Can this be done small scale with a hibachi or smoker grill?

One quick question about terra preta. If this was an amazon only phenominon, I would think anywhere there are campgrounds you'd basically find terra preta as the partially burned wood would be considered charcoal no? I never noticed the soil on campgrounds to be particularly fertile, more like pure sand. Where are all the remnants of ash and partially burned wood disappearing if not incorporated into the soil?

Yes, you burn it until it dies down and starts forming coals and then extinguish it. But no, you don't want it to just smolder. You need it to burn well or it won't be charcoal all the way through. It helps if your burn materials are at least somewhat dried out. The charcoal I've made ended up largely broken down into small pieces. Most pieces that were still identifiable as sticks or branches would easily break and crumble in my hands. Any pieces that don't crumble didn't pyrolyze all the way and get tossed into the next burn pile.

Not sure what to tell you about your neighbors and the fire department. You might check with your town or county to see if you really have a burn ban. It would be too dry and dangerous for me to burn in the summer, but I can do it over the winter and early spring. But yes, I guess you could do small batches in your barbeque grill.

I think there are several reasons why you don't find "fertile firepits" at campgrounds. First, it's not just charcoal alone. There has to be organic matter added also. Second, the charcoal has to be broken up enough to be mixed through the soil. Not just big chunks sitting on the surface. Third, all the wood in the firepits I've seen eventually gets burned down to ash. All the carbon is gone by the time it's ash. Also, ash makes soil alkaline and it has such a fine texture that water leaches it out of soil very quickly, so what little fertilization it provides tends to wash away. That's why you may see "slash and char" described as a big improvement over "slash and burn" in Terra Preta articles.

How about a galvanized steel trash can? That would hold a lot more than a small grill. Also the lid can be placed on it once it stops smoking to burn in the absence of air, right?

Also do the thorns burn faster than the canes? I would think the thorns would still be present.

This is the kind of thing where pictures are worth 1000 words.

Once dry, I don't see why the thorns would not burn at least as fast as the rest. Because they stick out- they heat quicker and I'd guess that even in the unlikely event that they burn slower- the tips will be singed off.

Yes, I guess a picture would be helpful. Sorry I don't have any. But I'm sure that a steel trash can would work fine (maybe with air holes in the bottom?). However, once it stops smoking no further "burning" is needed. That's why I put it out with water. I think the "burning in the absense of air" stuff is more useful for making large, solid chunks of charcoal. It's really not worth it when you're turning thin branches into crumbly stuff for the garden.

And I'm really not sure if the thorns burn faster or slower than the canes. I only know that there's nothing sharp left over in the charcoal.