peds

No, I'm a smelly hippy with an aversion to unnecessary burning, and a desire to keep as much of the raw materials for use as possible. Everything that I'm taking out of my current nemesis, just over 100m of overgrown hedge (hawthorn, holly, goat willow, ash) is being kept for firewood, turned into woodchip for mulching in the garden and polytunnels I'll be building over the next year, kept aside for filling the bottom of raised beds hugelkulture style, or, and you'll laugh when you hear this, being taken apart by hand with pruning saw, loppers, and secateurs, and placed back into and on top of the soil that they came out of in the first place, after it's been moved a meter and a half to the east, ready for planting a new hedge in. Incredibly valuable slow-release fertiliser. Also, a lot of the hawthorn I'll be snipping into easy lengths and weaving through the sheep wire fencing I'll be putting up, to provide a bit of a windbreak for the establishing whips I'm dropping in the ground in a few weeks time. I expect all 100m of it to take me about three or four days.

I've got a good few hundred kilos of hawthorn sat in a heap in the middle of a field to deal with, and I'm not sure I've got the space to hide it all, so I'll definitely have to invest in the welders gloves. I guess the only acupuncture-free solution is to drop five figures on a much bigger chipper and have a fella feed it in with a grab on an excavator. But then I'd have to find something else to offer a temporary distraction from the other pains in my life.

That might be a solution... get in touch with a decent chainsaw carver, turn it into a priceless work of art, split the profits. Giant Lion Carved From Single Tree By 20 People In 3 Years Becomes The World's Largest Redwood Sculpture | Bored Panda WWW.BOREDPANDA.COM A giant wooden sculpture of a roaring lion now stands proudly in a Central Chinese city square, and the journey it took to get...

Hawthorn comes in many different shapes and sizes of course, it'll chew up long straight bits with no kinks no problem at all, but as soon as you add a bend or or two you have to manipulate it a lot more to get it down the tube, and the fact that it's a thorny bugger makes the wrestling a lot harder. The problem definitely isn't on the machine's side, it's a human issue. A heavy wax jacket and welder's gloves would fix it. Alternatively, dig a little deeper and find the cheapest option with feed rollers. This machine is fed only by gravity and elbow grease.

No no, not true. They are here come rain or shine.

I made a short time-lapse earlier of using the machine, but I can't upload it direct to here. I'll see if I can get it up elsewhere. Anyway, if you are chipping nothing but soft and brittle goat willow all day, then this wee chipper works like a dream. Anything with a bit of bite like holly or hawthorn though, honestly I'm just going to snip it up and poke it under a hedge. With no feed rollers, getting anything other than perfectly-prepped sticks in is a big of a physical affair. But big, straight sticks that you can wrestle into submission, she goes just fine. I've been dropping in 10cm logs and they get chewed up without the machine slowing down at all. It gives much smaller chip than bigger chippers, see photo of hand for scale. The chip will break down faster of course, meaning paths etc. will need to be topped up more often. I've gotten around the chip shitter being too low to the ground by using it on a pallet and shooting it into an old dustbin I found buried under the hedge, which then gets tipped into the wheelbarrow. Obviously this arrangement looks a bit too jonky for any professionals to consider, unless you can buy a fancy orange bin and shtick a Husqvarna logo on it or something.

Very helpful, thanks for that Dan.

Noone is willing to put a price tag on it? Feel free to highball it if you want!

Does it still work if the logs are facing the other way?

John Downie, thanks for the variety suggestion. It has been noted. All of the others you mention definitely have a place with the exception of sweet chestnut, which I don't think do particularly well around my way (which is a pity), and pear, which I'm thoroughly unenthusiastic about. I've never been excited about a pear the same way I have about an apple, for example.

Not really, the whole berm from which they are growing is being moved over a metre to the east. I'm fairly sure that a lot of it will bounce back from the rootstock anyway, the goat willows will just laugh it off and be five feet tall by this time next year. Some of the hawthorn and holly too, I imagine. But it's being replanted with a wider variety of species, including a load of fruits and nuts, and a few trees I've got in my own nursery now.

We've bought a narrow strip of land in the adjacent field so we can widen the track by about 1.5m all the way down. I have a fella coming with an excavator to flatten the current berm into the old drain in the field next door, and dig out a new drain, the earth of which will be piled up between lane and drain to build a new berm, and we'll be tapping new fenceposts in on the way back down. So I'm hoping most of the stumps will get dropped into the old drain and buried, and some of them will be able to sit in the berm or on top of it, for habitat creation, and to rot down into the soil and provide precious nutrients for the new hedge. The biggest ones that can't be left where they are will be carried up to where my chickens will live, again for habitat creation for chicken food. They'll be thrilled. I also have one really good sized bit of goat willow which is big enough to try and carve a little 2-seat bench out of when on its side. There's sheep wire embedded on one side, so I'm not bothered about adding it to the immense pile of firewood.

Covid has been great for spare time, I reckon we should have a couple of months of lockdown every year from now on.

The wire has been snipped out and is in a heap by the gate, waiting to go to scrap. Obviously the bits embedded in the trees are still there, and are being cut around, with the worst bits being replaced after the new hedge is planted, in the name of habitat creation. Six telegraph poles in total, they are the future shed. The trees were growing in and around the wire, most of them are down now. I've been at it about 5 days now, I reckon I've got another 5 to go. No burning, anything too much of a ball-ache to send through my adorable little pocket chipper (hawthorn, mostly) is going to be snippedand shredded, by hand, back on top of the new berm after the laneway has been widened, to help build the new soil. All 100m will probably take another full day. We'll not be buying firewood or woodchip... it's literally growing out of the ground, right there. We are aiming for a zero waste, self sufficient, home-grown sort of approach, dig?

I want the chip in a neat little pile next to the future shed, thanks, not scattered across the laneway we are resurfacing. The job is half done by now, I'm just looking for a rough idea of what I can invoice my wife for.