After collecting the branches I’d pruned from my Valencia orange tree, I knew just what I would do with them.
I could have sent them away in a trash can. I could have stacked them in a brush pile in a far corner of the yard. I could have chopped them into small pieces with my hand pruners. I’ve done all of those things with fruit tree prunings in the past.
But now I will run them through a wood chipper.
I’ve owned two different wood chippers. The first was the red one shown at the top of the post. It’s a 5-horsepower, gasoline-engine chipper. It worked well although it was loud. Eventually, the engine refused to start.
On the recommendation of a fellow gardener, I purchased the electric chipper shown in the photo above. It is not quite as loud as the gas-powered chipper, and after almost a year using it I have grown to like it better. These days, I find myself looking forward to pruning trees just so I can chip them up.
Turning awkward branches into small bits is pleasing. It also smells good. You can imagine the citrus aroma when I chipped those orange tree branches. Peach branches also smell nice, and some avocado branches give off a refreshing licorice scent.
But mostly I like what I can do with the wood chips (and shredded leaves). Often, I pour them under the tree from which I pruned. Doing so returns the nutrients taken from the tree in the body of those branches. The chips then feed the small organisms that break it down into nutrients that the tree can later use again. This can reduce or eliminate the need for fertilizer.
Instead, on this day, I spread the mulch under a newly planted Ettinger avocado tree.
(See my post about the benefits of using wood chips as mulch under fruit trees.)
Other times I pour the wood chips into a receptacle for making compost. It could be a wire bin, like this one I made:
The wood chips mixed with other ingredients, such as old vegetable plants, rotten fruit, weeds, food scraps, and manure will eventually become dark brown compost. Some of my homemade compost:
Which I use in many ways, including to grow all of my vegetable seedlings:
(See my post on making compost in simple ways.)
Do you have multiple fruit trees that you prune? Do you use mulch under the trees? Do you make compost? Then a wood chipper might be worth the price tag for you.
In the past, I’d thought using a chipper would not be efficient in terms of time and effort. It would be faster to send my prunings to the municipal disposal service where they could chip them along with everyone else’s landscape trimmings, and then I could later get a whole truckload of wood chips or compost from them for free or for a small fee.
(Miramar Greenery does this in San Diego, El Corazon does this in Oceanside, mulch and compost can be picked up at various sites in Los Angeles, and you can get free mulch in Riverside, in Ventura, and in Santa Barbara County, not to mention the option of Chip Drop.)
However, I’ve found that once I learned to use the chipper well it didn’t take much time or effort. I’m also comforted by knowing the provenance of my wood chips. And I like that there are no shredded bits of plastic or shards of glass, as I’ve always encountered in the municipal mulch and compost. Finally, the wood chips are right there at my feet, chipped into a bag that I can easily tote to wherever I want to spread them.
Using my own chipper has turned out to be convenient and worth the price of admission.
The chipper I’m using these days is the Sun Joe CJ603E, and it cost about $170 before tax.
It’s now hard for me to imagine not having a chipper to make fast mulch and compost, and to keep my trees’ nutrient resources in my yard. I like the closed loop. If you’re interested in this style of gardening, I bet you’ll also enjoy having your own wood chipper.
A list with links to all of my Yard Posts is HERE.
Greg, You referred to the SunJoe in one of your other posts and the light bulb went off in my head and said, Yeah! make my own mulch. I planted over 100 fruit trees in my little 1/2 acre yard and know exactly what to do now when I prune to keep all those trees reasonably small, pass them through the SunJoe. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and ways of doing things, I have picked up many things that work for me and are very useful. You and your family have a happy and safe weekend. Thank you for all that you do. On a hillside in Whittier.
Hi James,
Great to hear. You are indeed going to have quite a bit of chipping to do with that many trees. That’s a lot of fruit trees! I mean, wow, that is a lot of fruit trees! Well wishes to you too here on America’s birthday.
Greg, I have an orchard with over 200 trees of which probably 100 get pruned heavily, I am wondering if the SunJoe can handle that kind of load. How long would it take to chip them?
Hi Runip,
I’m guessing you’ll want a bigger chipper. If you do all of your pruning in concentrated times, I would even look into renting a large chipper once or twice a year. Those big chippers are so much more efficient.
Greg, What is the biggest size branch it can handle?
Hi Karin,
It handles branches up to 1.7 inches in diameter. I think of it as handling everything smaller than what I want to keep as firewood.
Love your blog! Thanks for the great information
Greg, it’s like you were reading my mind writing this. I usually run my electric mower over almost all of my trimmings to make mulch (which works great), but not the branches of course. I was thinking about this in particular for the school campus I take care of (which is almost all native CA plants.) The recycling coordinator in Burbank, CA mentioned in a recent webinar that most cities’ green bin clippings are handled an average of 17 times by heavy equipment, before landing back on the ground as mulch somewhere. That’s a LOT of carbon generated just to clip some branches! This is definitely the way to go. Keep it where it is created and let it feed the soil. Thanks for the electric chipper tip!
Hi Monica,
At first, I was surprised by that number: an average of 17 times! But upon thinking about it, that seems plausible. And that’s an aspect of this that I hadn’t considered. Thanks for bringing it up.
What a great idea, would never have thought of this handy machine! Thanks so much Greg.
I’m so surprised to see you planting lettuce in July? I thought the weather was too hot to plant lettuce after spring. I’m wondering if it will be planted in a cooler area of your yard? I’d love to plant some too! Laurie
Hi Laurie,
You’re right! The weather is too hot to plant lettuce after spring. I should have noted why in the world I’m putting in lettuce seedlings right now.
I’ve built a shade structure and I’m experimenting with different densities of shade cloth and I’ve planted different lettuce varieties under it to see if I can grow lettuce through summer (lettuce that tastes good and doesn’t rapidly bolt, that is). It’s just an experiment. I don’t recommend it, and I don’t expect it to be very successful, but you never know unless you try.
Yup just like all those avocado varieties we’d like to plant, but no nursery seems to carry; CALIFORNIA DREAMING
Thanks for your reply Greg, and good luck with the lettuce experiment!
Darn, this model wood chipper is out of stock, probably because so many homeowners are busy in their yards these days. ?Perhaps it’ll be back in a few months.
It is back is in stock now online
I have a chipper I use when there’s some chipping to be done. My annual clean up is too much, though, so I fill my trailer and head off to Miramar. You can hand load or they will fill your vehicle for a small fee. I go the small fee route and they bring a front loader up roughly the size of an aircraft carrier and drop a pile of compost in. I’ll email you a picture you can post if you like.
Hi Bob,
That is definitely the way to go if you need a lot of wood chips or compost, or if you have too much material to chip at one time.
I’ve had the bucket loaders at Miramar fill my truck bed many times over the years too. At first, I went the free route and hand loaded, but realized that the small fee is totally worth getting hundreds of pounds dropped into the truck bed in seconds.
Thanks for the photo.
Greg: I purchased a shredder about 30 years ago with a Briggs & Stratton engine.
“I COULDN’T STAND THE NOISE”, so I switched over to a Honda engine. It was the best thing I ever did if you can get past the idea of getting rid of something made in USA.
I’ve used “Chip Drop” but you have to be careful. The last load had a whole lot of
palm fronds that are hard to cut up (to put in your trash cans) and don’t compost
(in less than 20 years). The load also had a lot of pine needles mixed in with the chips.
I was not happy.
I finally found a use for palm fronds. I use sago fronds as mulch for the dirt I don’t want the chickens digging up. They figure out real fast that they’re pointy.
I like it, Bob. Just yesterday, some chickens got out and scratched all the mulch away from the baby tree I’d just planted.
Hi Greg,
Good to see you’ve come over to the electric chipper side! I love my Harbor Freight model 69293. For home orchard use, ya can’t beat an electric chipper: sound, weight, mulch size, cost, size (storage), and no gasoline cans.
I do have some ornamental material that is difficult to chip with flexible and springy branches, like Ceanothus. I let the cut material dry out and run my electric mower over it. Eazy peazy.
My experience with Miramar free “compost” was it was very rough with lots of woody material… in short I’d call it “mulch”. Their free “mulch” is very course with pieces as big as my fist. Their compost does not have the earthy smell nor the crumbly texture I’d expect of good compost, like your home compost.
See ya around, Robert
I have a box I throw all the kitchen waste into and the chickens devour it and make me good home made compost. The city stuff is pretty decent for my needs but isn’t super earthy like the stuff we all make. For what it is and for what it costs (free if you load) it works pretty well. Each year I typically fill that trailer up and spread it throughout the yard and the trees seem to really like it. I don’t much need their mulch anymore as I typically take my cuttings and shred them for mulch or I just drop cuttings on the ground and let them decompose in place.
I’ve always burried our kitchen waste in my garden in holes that I dig at least 18″ deep. Compost is most definately good for my not so good clay based Mission Viejo soil. I’ve saved every single cutting from my pruning. Mostly shrubs, ficus trees I keep pruned, wild grape vines, and leaves. I spread them out over the rear lawn and shred them with my 5 hp Toro lawn mower. I then use them in my garden to help retain moisture. At season end I turn them into the soil.
Having done this now for at least 20 years it’s made a wonderful difference. I have thousands of worms now. It’s probably not the best use of a lawn mower but it works. I don’t attempt to cut any branches larger than 1/2″ in diameter. And anything close to this size I cut in to segments not longer than 9″.
Do you chip your potato and tomato vines? I thought they might be toxic to some plants if you recycled them back to your garden? My plants grow over ten feet or more, even though I clip them. I’ve been throwing away the vines.
Hi Jan,
I don’t always put my old potato and tomato vines through the chipper, but I do always add them to the compost pile. I’ve never noticed any problems.
Thank you so much! I just ordered and it is even cheaper now! Getting a shredder was the wrong choice, since my leaves can be composted quickly without being shredded. I jsut needed to learn to bury and layer the leaves, and never try using those plastic compost containers. I have few trees, but the honeysuckle branches and the carrotwood tree still make enough wood that I don’t want to throw it away. I am organic, so I cannot accept city mulch, and I hate giving away my clean wood.
That’s funny I was researching chippers myself and the Sun Joe was one of the finalists. I believe that model has a wider intake than most of the other electric chippers. Read a lot of mechanical issues and how they jam up with soft wood. Turns out the HOA here chips their trees and has piles of it for everyone’s use and it seems like I’m the only guy using them because I never see anyone else going down and picking any up.
I still walk down and fill up a cart full and haul it back so I’m putting some effort in 🙂
Let’s see how that Sun Joe holds up after another year! I might want one anyways…