Compost Trees

Video Transcript

"Hi. This is Yolanda Vanveen on behalf of Expert Village. In this series, we are talking all about how to start your own compost heap. In this segment, we are going to discuss turning trees into compost. Here we have our pile of wood chips, or wood clippings, or wood compost. This last summer, we had quite a few large trees and a couple of them were on their way out, dying, and we wanted to build a shop in that area, so we had some trees we had to dispose of. So, the first thing we did was we hired an expert to cut down the main tree from the top to the bottom into big hunks, so that we could use it for firewood. Then, we had all the branches cut off and we didn't know what to do with them. So, my husband rented a chipper at the local rental equipment store and we brought it home. It wasn't very much to rent it for a day, we were very surprised to find out it wasn't as much as we thought it would be. And we took all of the branches and ran it through the chipper and as a result, we have a pile of wood chips. I love my wood chips. I'm using it for everything; between our raised flower beds, we had some pest barrier (which is plastic) down and we were going to put rocks on top of it, but we decided to put the wood chips on top. No weeds have come up and it's really nice in between the raised beds too. It's making it really warm in between, and everything is growing really well. Now, when I'm starting some new raised beds, I'm just putting a little layer of the wood chips on the bottom of the raised bed. That way I know there is going to be great drainage and none of my plants will rot. So, I'm going to put compost on top of the chips. So, I just find that whenever you have trees that you need to get rid of or anything else that is woody, you can always rent a chipper and turn it into wood compost that you can use for many years. Next we will talk about how to use leaves and grass clippings in compost. "