Homeowners, Do You Need a Chipper/Shredder?

Me, the lazy cheapskate gardener, with a $500 chipper/shredder that only gets used a few times a year taking up space in my tool shed? Of course! It's saving me time, space, and money.

What's a Chipper/Shredder?

A chipper/shredder is like a big food processor for trees. Mine has a noisy 8HP gas motor, and some nastily dangerous chopping blades inside. It's the size of a large lawn mower, or one of those expensive prams you see in trendy neighborhoods. It's so heavy it takes two people to hoist into my truck. Small branches go in, wood chips come out. Bushes go in, coleslaw comes out.

Saving Time and Space with a Chipper/Shredder

This city only has bulk trash pick-up 4 times a year. We are allowed to put the trash out no more than a week in advance of the pick-up week. Making things worse, one of the collection periods is in 110+ degree mid-summer weather. Another is in the middle of ski season. We have two usable collection periods.

Some homeowners work frantically for the week before bulk trash, pruning and hauling bits of mangled trees to the curb. Others prune early, but then they have to store large piles of trashy prunings and then haul them to the curb. These trash piles attract scorpions, roof rats and other vermin.

The shredder can turn a SUV-sized pile of dead oleanders into a couple of large trash bags full of dead oleander shreds. It turned two medium sized palo verde trees into a pile of wood chips about the size of an office desk, with only a few large branches left over. Conveniently, the branches that are too big to be shredded are big enough for outdoor grilling and the fireplace. We prune at our convenience when the weather is good, shred the prunings immediately, and dump them on the compost piles. Any non-burnable tree limbs, such as from the palo verde, can be stacked tidily out of the way for the bulk trash pickup. If a storm rips a big branch off a tree, we can clean it up immediately, instead of storing it or hauling it to the dump.

Saving Money with a Chipper/Shredder

Hiring a crew to prune, shred and haul the debris costs about $150 per tree per year. We have almost 1/2 acre with a dozen trees and a decade of neglect to catch up to. Renting a shredder locally costs $100 for 24 hours. Buying the shredder cost about $500, and it is used about 8 weekends a year, so it has saved us hundreds of dollars in rental fees.

And then there's the compost! I turn all the shredded stuff and fallen leaves into compost and mulch. So far there has been enough compost to fill two raised vegetable beds, mulch a 20x50 foot area full of desert shrubs, and mulch the walking area around the raised beds for mud control. By the end of summer I'll have even more. Buying that much compost would cost $300 or more in bulk. If I ever get a surplus of compost, there's always a local gardener who will come haul it away. Even if I didn't make compost, being able to prune when it's most convenient for me and having less to store until bulk trash collection week would be reason enough to shred the prunings.