We hired a shredder. Big mistake. It seemed logical at the time: with a dozen or more trees in need of a good autumn haircut we had already ruled out most of the disposal options. A skip would be too unwieldy and end up sitting on the drive all week. Hippo Bags, where you rent the bag and then pay for it to be collected and the contents disposed of would be prohibitively expensive (almost £400 for what we needed, by our reckoning). Trips to the tip in the car: time-consuming and entirely environmentally unfriendly.
So we hired a shredder, planning to poke the branches in one end and then scoop out bagfuls of chippings from the other, which we could use to re-carpet the chicken run. Perfect recycling.
Turns out it doesn’t work like that. All we got out of it was a cloud of petrol smoke and a whole lot of noise, and when we poked out branches and sticks in one end, they came out the other looking just the same. After ten minutes it was clear we were fighting a losing battle, and we gracefully admitted defeat.
If only we’d known. If only we’d asked around. We had a bit of over-the-fence chit chat with next door later on and they confirmed our findings: they’d hired one a couple of months ago and had the same disappointing experience. Their goal wasn’t carpeting a chicken run, of course – they wanted to make mulch to fertilise an allotment, but it wouldn’t have been much good, even if it had been properly chipped up. They only found out after the event that you have to leave it to settle for four years before digging it in if you want to do that.
So the moral of the story: don’t hire shredders unless you want to make an expensive mistake.
The chickens don’t care. In fact, I think they’ve come off better as a result. We’ve saved a couple of the longest branches to make them some new perches and a bit of a climbing playground, and in the meantime they’re enjoying pecking off all the leaves.
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Are any of the branches thin enough to be any use for pea and bean supports?
You should invest in a small brazier so that when the branches dry out and you can find no other use for them, you can burn them without smoking out the neighbours. Then you will have wood ash to dig into your borders and it’s surprisingly good mulch for your trees if you hoe it into the soil. It’s also good mixed into compost heaps.
Just don’t leave it in a pile to get wet as it becomes a nasty, unusable mess.
Unfortunately the trees that we cut down were, for the most part, quite gnarled and chunky. It’s not all bad, though, as we have rescued some of the longest, straightest pieces for perching material, and some of the V- and Y-shaped branches as supports, so we will be using them to augment the chicken run.
I would have liked to have found enough thin, long ones to weave a little fence for the plot, but unfortunately couldn’t.