Wood Chipper In Action - Shredding Leaves - by Old Sneelock's Workshop
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ต.ค. 2015
- A first try at shredding leaves with the MTD 5 HP Woodchipper. Fall is here and so are the leaves.
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I take a full sheet of OSB or plywood, cut lengthways into two 2'x8' pieces, which are laid on edge at each side of the leaf ramp forming a 'V'. One can then use a leaf blower to 'herd' the leaves into the chute. Covering the other chutes helps to create more of a vacuum at the leaf opening.
Great idea. 😁😎
Was waiting for the tarp to get sucked in. But thanks the same! That ramp seems like a good way to throttleintake, even if imperfect. I could see building an even bigger funnel.
It needs air flow to work. I am thinking about adding a blower to the intake to feed the leaves in at a more controlled rate.
I just bought a used shreader like yours and was watching you rake leaves in,, I wonder if it would really suck them if a person made like a plywood lid to put on the top chute so all the suction would be coming from the bottom??
MissouriOldTimer It's worth a try. The problem I have is the throat of the shredder chokes. It works best if you feed a steady smaller stream of leaves so it has enough air to pull the leaves in.
Nothing wrong with a cheap blower. I am getting close to retirement and therefore watch my spending. I have a cheap garden blower and it’s lasted as long as some of the expensive ones I had in the past. I had to giggle about the blowing against the wind line. Been there and done that too many times.
We have a quarter acre block near Melbourne, Victoria and have our own leaves and all the neighbours leaves that overhang our fencing. Therefore we have a lot of leaves to get rid of in autumn. Unfortunately we don’t have room for a mulcher, therefore I blow ours into piles and then switch the blower to vacuum and suck them up into a bag. The vac has an internal mulcher that shreds the leaves small enough for composting or spreading around the gardens as mulch.
Any leaves on the lawn I run over with our mulching mower and that creates nutrients for the lawn.
Great video as usual mate. You have a nice home there.
Thanks. Since I got the bagging mower I escaped the leaf raking. I don't use the chipper shredder much now.
There are too many to burn. The bagger chops and mixes the leaves with grass and dirt so it decomposes quicker. Having the little wooded area for the leaves to rot in makes a lot of new topsoil each year. 😁😎
@@OldSneelock yeah I noticed the areas under the trees. I envy you. Such a beautiful place.
A lot of our shade comes from sails hung on large steel poles. My wife is a blonde from England and therefore prone to sunburn. We had to install expensive sails over the backyard to protect her around the pool area until the neighbour’s trees grew enough.
Looks like you made a good deal, Unc! I still haven't made my mind up about the Duerr because I'm still in firewood mode. Was going to mow up some leaves under the river birch but I quartered and halved the big log blocks and my back said no, no so I didn't. The rain will bring the rest down and I'll get them later on God willing. I used to do yard work and blew leaves with a wheeled blower with an 8 horse Briggs on it. Beat raking but when Stihl came out with the backpacks, that thing went to sleep. I've got an Echo handheld that works really well and with the throttle you can put them on a tarp, no problem BUT I hear the electric jobs all around is for deck blowing. You got a fine rig! Glad of it!! Nice leaf working music too!!!
+Lewie McNeely My neighbor has a backpack blower. I don't know if it's a Stihl but he spends a lot less time fiddling with the cord than I do.
They'll do the job but are hard on the back. We used to have to hand pick all the bushes on the high $$$ places but those blowers took care of that! I would say no more bushes but we didn't get that wild. Just no more leaves IN the bushes!
Got the same shredder.good unit,but bad for clogging with damp leaves.
Dan Van Hoose Does do a lot better with leaves dry enough to move with the blower.
Dumping them into the top chokes it. I think if it had a ducted fan blowing the leaves in so they didn't bunch up it would be a lot better.
What I have done was zip tied a pipe wrapped in the tarp so that the leaf blower doesn’t get underneath it and if you put one on the other side of the tarp also you can drag your leaves across the yard like a leaf taco .
Clever. 😆😎
I am absolutely envious of all your leaves. I need leaves and small branches to make mulch for a garden. I'm scouting the desert looking for suitable material to shred.
If you will pay for the shipping I can load up a truck load for you. :-)
I have been in your position before. I bought a house that had a gravel yard. No topsoil just gravel. I went to the local sewage plant and for the next 3 months I loaded and unloaded what started as 1 truckload of digester sludge per night after work to 3 per night by the end of the summer. I was much younger then. :-)
Sewage plant , wow ,that's real desperation there. My mother lives on property that is just sand and rock desert. We manage to get several dump truck loads of pecan hulls from a local pecan grower. I bought a small Sun Joe chipper and we are collecting discarded branches and other desert plant debris. Want to create a grow-able area for a few vegetables without breaking the bank.
That is a lot of work. Are you able to have any animals? We raised chickens and they scrounged for bugs while making fertilizer by the pile. :-)
You might be surprised at how many farmers used composted sewage for their fields. I was doing the hauling back in 1979 and since then the system has changed. Rather than draining the digesters into settling ponds on the sewage plant property where it dried out and became black dirt, they load it into large tanker trucks and haul it to some farmers field. They use a special rig to inject it under the surface of the field.
There are a lot of dairy farmers and pig farmers that do the same thing with their animal waste.
Do pecan hulls decompose into good soil? I haven't seen any pecan trees in my area. We have walnuts, hickory nuts, and butternuts but the shells from those are very acidic. It's hard to get grass to grow under one of them.
Azannah11 - Since you´re in the desert.
Instead of carrying/loading leaves possibly from far away sources. Get a bag of mixed seeds for cover crops, its smaller and probably way cheaper. Have a go on the proper season.
Build it directly, of course some outside input helps, but is not an "obligation".
When ready mulch it, flail mower is the best. Then do it again... It will be a continuous process of improvement.
Seed germination in the first try probably will be disappointing, but it will improve.
Lots of bio mass in relatively short time. ;-)
Cheers
You might try mulching with shredded paper and cardboard. I used to work at a Walmart, and they had an unbelievable amount of cardboard they had to bale up every day -- they were more than happy to give away as much as they could. As a bonus, you can also grow oyster mushrooms on cardboard, then use the broken down material as compost. I have this horrible clay soil, and I'm really getting into growing mushrooms in no small part as a way of hopefully affordably amending it.
Hard to believe someone would make a video of blowing leaves.
Having made a video of blowing leaves I find it hard to believe that it has been watched 69,768 times. Of course one of those was yours.
It also has a 54% watch rate. About 20% higher than the average watch rate for a lawn care video.
The most astounding part is it has made $326.44 in ad revenue.
With all that it still gets more views every day and pays off a bit in the ad revenue.
Not bad for a video showing leaf blowing and shredding with a chipper.
What chipper is this? Haven’t found a unit like this one that I could rake leaves into. All of them just have the hopper
I will have to go check the chipper to see. I haven't been using it on leaves since I got a mower with a bagger.
Nice! If you want to get the leaves to decompose rapidly, just add nitrogen material e.g. Food scraps, grass clippings and manure if possible which will cause the pile to heat up and decompose at a much faster rate, especially if you're shredding them! Cheers
Thanks for the tip.
Straight leaves and pee on them once in a while.
Must be you live in a rather secluded spot.
Make a compost pile with those leaves. Come spring plant some potatoes in the half decomposed leaves. Works good with sweet potatoes also. Very little maintenance and easy to dig out when the time comes. Almost like for free.
+Steve McEntyre That's where ours go, plus grass clippings and just about everything else. We've got a tumbler composter for the scraps, which ain't much but peels but it all adds up. Sweetums has been growing some really scrumptious salad stuff seeing we're either diabetic or hypo so that taters don't get the benefit of the stuff but the rest does. She's got collards that look like they've been waxed! Maybe I might get some for supper!
+Steve McEntyre I piled up the leaves but evidently I'm not following natures way to compost. The leaves I piled up last year are still sitting there looking like a pile of wet leaves. I thought if I chopped them up they might decompose better. I thought about tilling them under but the area is surrounded by trees and the ground is full of their roots. I don't want to kill the trees so I put the tilling idea on the back burner. There might be something in the soil here or perhaps it's the type of leaves. At the old house they turned to dirt over the winter and I could rake the pile out over the garden. This house sits on a postage stamp so not much room for gardens. What isn't under the trees gets sun about 4 hours a day. I haven't given up on the compost idea yet.
The ground up ones rot quicker. Sweetums uses the mower to grind them, then scatters them on her beds with a little lime to counteract the acid and covers it with black plastic. The wormies pull the leaves down to their dining room and have at it. All gone by spring and a clean start to putting in the new plants/seeds. We use grass clippings for mulch, plus rye straw and chips for pathways. It's HER deal and it works really well.
Lewie McNeely Good idea with the lime. I wonder if all the mulberry trees are making the soil acidic where I have the leaves piled? If so that might be why they aren't composting as fast.
I'm going to pick some up tomorr.... oops it's just past midnight so I'll do it today. Does she cover them with the plastic to keep the bed warm? I'm going to probably have snow in 3 or 4 weeks.
Thanks for the tip Lewie.
You're WAY behind on your naps and now I know why. You're nocturnal. Toots gets that way sometimes too. The lime just helps with the acid a little. Those mulberry leaves may just be like walnut leaves, just slow to break down. Grinding does help. The plastic helps keep it warm and working all winter and if you want something to break down in a hurry, put the plastic on through the summer. Helps it cook and kills weed seeds too!A win/win deal and you're welcome, Unc! About time I get to give something back to the FIXIT!!!
10:50 is where the mulching magic happens
😁
@@OldSneelock
You only showed the shredder for a minute or two and you didn't even give a close-up of the final results. I was hoping to see how fine the shredder made the leaves after one pass.
Would have been nice to have seen the leaves after the shreddding.
Good suggestion.
Tarp laying under the intake seems like a bad idea
Good thought. This isn't a yard vac. You have to either rake the leaves up a ramp to the intake or dump the leaves into a bin above the intake.
y r u leaving so many behind u
They were falling nearly as fast as I was raking. I don't bother trying to get every leaf.
Just hire a landscaper 😂
That is the norm in Richland.
Retired executives and quite a few. service companies.
I am the urban maverick in this situation. 😁😎
Why waste all those leaves, all that work, all that money and all that petrol by not making leaf mould?
Frank E Davidson Don Duncan got in ahead of you. But thanks for watching.
Burning leaves? That's worse than a waste of a valuable resource; it's turning a blessing into a curse (air pollution). My blower has never been used for blowing. I vacuum up my leaves, shredding 15-1 into a bag hanging from my shoulder. The shredded leaves make great mulch or compost well with a 50/50 mix of green or a little manure. You can't get a more nutrient rich soil mix. And I do it all in less than 1/4th the time he took. How? It's quicker to vacuum than blow and I shred simultaneously.
Don Duncan Interesting concept. My blower is designed to vacuum and shred also. How do you manage all the leaves. I can rake up a cubic yard of leaves from 15 foot square area. Not once but multiple times each fall. The bag that came with the blower will hold about 1 cubic foot of leaves. I struggled with unhooking and dumping the bag after walking just a few yards.
It involved stopping. Turning off the blower. Disconnecting the bag. Walking to the pile. At first I dumped the shredded leaves onto the compost pile. Then to save steps i dumped them into a cart and pulled the cart to the compost pile. Unzip the bag. Dump the leaves. Clean the zipper. Zip up the bag. Walk back to the blower. Pick it up and start again.
In my small 9000 square foot yard that was repeated roughly 40 times. Each time.
What brand is your vacuum?
I ended up with this setup because I don't have storage for my first choice, a vacuum cart. The chipper shredder takes care of the sticks and debris that choked my blower. It will handle up to a 1 1/2" stick . The rest of them go into the fireplace.
I am interested in your ideas on how to manage the leaves. I'm currently composting them but they take 2 years to fully break down. Even then the compost is too acidic. I have 4 pickup loads of shredded leaves with little or no use for that much compost. My neighbors have the same quantities of leaves if not more. We are disappearing under the drift.
Except for my neighbor across the street. He has 3 acres and is allowed by statute to burn them. 😠
I had my wife make a bigger bag, so big it dragged behind me. The zipper is on the bottom, so I unzip over the wheel barrow (I had a big one), it empties out, and I zip up and continue. I looked at a lot of vacuums, I bought a Craftsman for $100 about 25 years ago. I chose it because it was the only one that reduced volume by 15-1, the others were 10-1. My 8.5 h. chipper was a monster that was very noisy so I didn't like to use it, but it would do a lot fast.
I used to have a 140 sq. foot raised bed garden where I spread the leaf mulch. It was gone in the spring. Any left over I composted in a drum with lots of greenery & a little manure when available (not often). My neighbors gave me their grass clippings, mine were blown back into the lawn by my electric mulching mower.
It shouldn't take more than a month to compost your shredded leaves, if you turn the pile every 3 days, and have enough nitrogen. A good organic fertilizer is urine. I use it in my container garden, diluted 10-1. For spraying on leaves, 40-1. For heavy feeders, 4-1. I would use it straight on the compost pile, and every time you turn the first 3 times. How long to finish? It depends on the weather and local conditions, but just experiment to find what's best for you, depending on time of year. Why bother? The two best soil builders are leaves and wood in various forms but not from all trees, some have growth inhibitors (not many). What do you get for your trouble? BLACK GOLD! Add a little worm castings if you don't have worms. I started my raised bed in(CA) 1990 with a truck full of pure worm castings. I left it in 2007 when we sold, retired, moved.
I am currently looking for a yard with a forest of high tree canopy for sub-tropical permaculture here in L.V., NV. They are doing it in Phoenix and near Tampa. I can't find good produce anywhere, especially the kind I want. So, I'll just grow it myself, after building up the soil from scratch.
Don Duncan Thanks for the information Don.
This is a timely conversation. Just this week I was able to pull a bit of compost out of the pile. We have been discussing uses and scaling up the process to reduce the time lag.
I like the idea of a raised bed to assist with the composting and to actually use the compost. The trees in the yard are the reason we liked the house. When we bought the house 6 years ago there were even more trees.
Could I bounce a couple questions off of you?
Where do you find the urea? Is it powdered like Miracle Grow?
The leaf pile is on the back corner of our property. My wife and I are discussing rototilling the leaves to mix them with the soil. I'm currently flipping the pile with a tractor and a 3 point blade. I can't physically mix the leaves with the soil by hand just based on quantity.
Is it going to be worth the trouble or should I just do the urea and wait.
Thanks for your help.
I love trees, especially those that bear fruit. They are the gift that keeps on giving, e.g., you can't buy tree ripened, organic fruit with great flavor, except maybe if you have a good neighbor or good farmer's market. In my area I have neither. But growing your own assures quality, saves money, saves shopping/driving time. And you will find joy in connecting with nature/earth. I gardened in a raised bed since the '50s (my early teens) but I always had trees too. I found them less work/more produce. They are now my major focus.
I don't use commercial fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides because they upset the balance of nature. There are organic solutions that work with nature, instead of solving one problem and creating more. A free fertilizer is your pee (urine). Another is growing plants like the Mexican Sunflower that can be slowly clipped using the "chop/drop" method. The plant is high in nitrogen and helps decompose high carbon material like leaves, wood fiber (chips, sawdust). Chicken poop is good but raising them is a lot to work. However, free range eggs are so good you won't ever go back. Here they sell for $8-9/dozen (If you trust the seller).
Adding soil at the beginning or turning puts microbes in which will help decompose. Not much is needed, 5%. But first, did you shred your leaves? I was not successful composting leaves until I shredded. It takes 1-2 years without shredding. They have to be dry before you start. After shredding you can use them as a mulch around your trees, with wood chips on top. You can add straight pee around mature trees, as fertilizer.
If I assume you are stuck with a big pile of damp, whole leaves (worst case), then it is too late to shred as they will clog the machine. And they stick together, making them hard to aerate. Until I discovered shredding I considered leaves a problem, afterward, a treasure. But, back to whole leaves (ugh). I will speculate. First: Nitrogen + air + moisture = quick compost. It will happen without your help, but it takes much longer. So, your mission is to speed up decomposition. Two high nitrogen sources are fresh greenery such as grass clippings (my all time favorite) or fresh fertilizer (foul is best). Do you have either? I know you have lots of urine. You can mix in straight, fresh is best, but you still need to aerate every 3 days, turning with your spading fork or in a tumbler, and adding a little moisture if needed. Commercial composting is done in long cylinder on a slant, turning slowly. Think of it as a "digesting tract" for plant waste, mix in one end, finished product (compost) out the other.
How good is your soil? How deep does the topsoil go? It can never be too deep or too rich. It is the foundation for growing, and you should be thinking of ways to at least maintain it, if not increasing fertility.
Ask yourself, does nature till? In general, no. Soil is a microclimate, an ecosystem for thousands of life forms, little understood, but essential for all life. Don't disturb it by plowing or tamping down (with heavy machinery).
If you don't want a shredder and can wait then build a mesh cage e.g. with chicken wire and let the weather and fungus break down the leaves into leaf mould.
Ahh neighbors.....Ya gotta love em , not.
+halfwayuphill I would really rather live in the country with at least a mile between me and my closest neighbor. Life is about relationships and I have always held the belief that living in town you have at least 5 neighbors. One of which is bound to drive everyone crazy.
Perhaps I should think about this for a moment....... I might be the one driving everyone crazy!
Did I just waste my time?
Idea, build a conveyor belt system , that will carry the leaves into the chipper ,
I set up a compost ile and bought a mower with a bagger the clippings and leaves are all cut and mixed with dirt. I just toss them in a layer over the pile and by spring they are all good soil.
The chipper only does a few sticks for mulch now and then.