Some asked about the size of the pieces of wood chips. Below is a picture of my new raised bed after I filled it up with chips. The second is a close-up after it rained this afternoon, and the bed settled down some. The close-up shows that the chips are mostly slightly bigger or slightly smaller than a quarter. The are about the same thickness as a quarter as well. Some of it has bamboo stems that are about half the diameter of a pencil and 12 to 24 inches longs. There aren't too many of these, which are sort of like stiff wheat straw. In each wheelbarrow full, I would normally find a piece the size of my hand that was about 1/4 inch thick. I would not have wanted an entire load of these big bits, but a few mixed in weren't a problem for me for the price. If it's Free, I can pick out some bits I don't like. I live on a fixed income, so the price is perhaps more important to me that it might be to other. If you had a chopper that would shred the stuff into smaller bits, it would really be grand. Well now that it's settled down a bit, I'm going to put a single layer of newspaper, a few inches of finished leaf/grass compost, and transplant my strawberries from containers. Since I'm using the chips as a filler in the bed below my plants, I'm going to start fertilizing them with dilute water soluble fertilizer once per week. The nutrients that wash down through the top layer should be absorbed by the chips and help their decomposition proceed. I've got almost 2 months until first frost, then I'll cover the strawberries with some pine straw until spring, when I will resume fertilizing again. I've also used the chips to mulch around my fruit trees, blackberries, and muscadines that I'm growing in containers. It's worked great for that as well. I've got few dog paths in the backyard where my dogs aways run along the same route and keep the grass killed down. I've spread some the wood chips along their paths as well. They were a big bulky and hard to walk on at first. I watered these paths and then tamped then down by rolling a 5 gallon bucket full or dirt back and forth along the path twice. After that they were fine for walking on without tripping on bits sticking up. Other people might not have had good experience with the chips from tree services, but I'm happy with mine. My only real problem has been that their truck was so big they could not drive up my driveway because of power lines. They had to dump the pile of wood chips in my front yard next to the street, and I've had to cart it all to my backyard where I garden. At first I used a wheelbarrow, but it didn't hold very much. Now I'm using the 100 gallon rolling trash can that my trash service supplies. It's making a lot faster work of hauling it about the yard. Greg

Maybe, possibly Cottony Maple Scale? the link below may help. Here is a link that might be useful: Cottony Maple Scale

nancedar, the breakdown of such materials requires the activity of organisms which use nitrogen. The "nitrogen cycle" provides the nitrogen in the process of composting. If the uncomposted material is used perhaps, to improve the physical condition of the soil, then it may be necessary to apply a nitrogen source (ammonium sulfate was the most economical in my day) to offset nitrogen deficiency in the crop. I have reason to believe that the use of sawmill bypoducts like sawdust, work very well, in a symbiotic manner, with legume crops; although I myself never had the opportunity to observe this first hand.

Gotcha Dave. Sour is often used to mean acidic, though most folks don't probably realize that when they use the word. But I see what you're saying. For my part, I would never advocate purposely mixing uncomposted woodchips into soil. As a mulch layer over the top-yes, of course. But not mixed in. The other problem with bark or woodchip mulches is their tendency to form a hydrophobic mat. It seems that some of these beneficial fungi which colonize the chip layer, over time, glue the whole thing together with their mycellia. I've already seen it where you can lift an entire tree ring of mulch with one hand like it's all one-piece. The only reasonable method for dealing with this-so far as I'm aware-is to get your three-prong cultivator out and gently work the stuff up. That also freshens its appearance. We use wetting agents to water some of our ornamental plantings in areas where stirring up the mulch isn't feasible, but I wouldn't expect the average homeowner to be purchasing wetting agents! BTW, some folks claim just your general-purpose dish detergent will "work just as well" as the expensive pro stuff. I can tell you from direct experience that's not necessarily so. The big manufacturers of consumer goods like dish detergent vary their recipes as different supplies come and go, or as ingredient prices rise and fall. So you never really know what you're getting. At least with professional wetting agents, they are what they say they are. And it is possible to find relatively low-cost ones, relatively being the operative word there. +oM