Chipping Machine: A Way to Help Composting and Mulching

A chipping machine is a useful gardening tool, it keeps your garden or yard clean and turns the waste from the garden into compost. It also saves you energy and time you would otherwise spend disposing the waste from your yard.

The clean up you have to do during the autumn season or when a thunderstorm fells your trees is not the easiest neither is it fun, but when you have a chipping machine, the fallen leaves, branches and trees can become organic waste in a few hours.

Burning waste used to be the easy way out but using a chipping machine has become the more socially acceptable and environmentally-friendly option for getting rid of your yard debris.

Chipper shredders are a versatile gardening tool; you can use it to shred leaves and garden scraps to mulch and turn your fallen leaves into leaf mold, you can use it to eliminate cornstalks and harvest waste by turning them into compost.

If you are not yet sure about the benefits or uses of a chipping machine, here are some things you can gain from using one;

You can use it to make wood chips for a garden path or convert it to garden compost

You can use it to reduce yard waste from a large pile of trees, branches or leaves to a smaller collection that you can manage and move around and pack into a garbage bag with other gardening tools like a shovel or rake.

It will save you time and money that you will otherwise spend when you call a professional to remove your hedge cuttings.

Some types of waste like cabbage and tomato stems turn to compost faster when you turn them to small shreds first.

Wood chips and shreds that you convert to compost are useful just before the winter season; you can use them to insulate the soil so you can start growing early during the spring season.

There are two basic types of chipper shredders, the gas-powered shredders, and the electric shredders.

The electronic machines are more suitable for residential use because they are portable, quiet, lightweight and very handy for chopping garden or yard waste.

Although, you will need a heavy duty extension cord for this unit and a circuit with a slow-blow fuse as they consume a lot of energy. However, not all the electric units consume so much power, and a few of them won’t blow fuses like others.

If you have a large yard or garden, you may want to consider investing in a small gas-powered chipper shredder instead as most of the electric shredders won’t work as well with long extension cords. If you have many trees and have to deal with a large property, a five or eight hp gas powered chipping machine will be a better choice.

There are ideal times to use garden shredders and these includes:

Early summertime: make wood chip after cutting hedges to reduce the piles of hedge trimmings.
Autumn: you can also use them after trimming your branches and shrubs and cleaning up corn stalks, this allows you to turn heavy wood with greens into mulch. When you shred them into compact sizes, they fit better into compost bins.

There are many ways in which chipper shredders work such as:

Cutting and crushing.
There are two parts to a chipping machine, the chipper, and the shredder, the chipper part uses a spiked drum to crush and cut wood and branches against a plate anvil or another drum. The machine works with a steady beat, and it works best when you want to turn branches into wood chips.

Shredding discs and pre-cutting knives.
The pre-cutting knives are usually above a shredding disc that rotates quickly. This method is excellent with softer types of waste such as shrubs and twigs. It is noisier and vibrates more, and it turns your waste into crumbly chips. However, the shredding discs can work without pre-cutting knives, and it will turn your waste into long strips.

Shredding discs on a flywheel.
This method is excellent because it is fast and easy to use, the flywheel has two slits with shredding knives on each side. The disc rotates rapidly while the flywheel gains momentum and maintains speed against resistance. The anvil plate in the cutting chamber holds the feed in place while the knives are shredding it. It usually includes a pusher to assist feeding the material into the unit, and the hopper has to steady the feed. It has an entry and exit point and the exit point, and because of the size of the exit, the large feed is shredded down to compact dimensions before coming out. But it does not have pre-cutting knives, so some branches turn into strips instead.

Turbine blades.
This method is another one that’s ideal for small pieces of waste or branches and twigs up four centimeters. It has a cone of blades that rotate and you place the material into the feed hopper. It works quietly and is good wood and shrubs.