Ive just started this good game so perhaps the more seasoned can help . What the hell to do with all the shavings ! - Already I have bags and bags of them. I realise that some people compost, but I dont have a garden that needs it, Burning on an open fire tends to choke the fire, seems a waste just to bin them. Maybe I thought they could be pressed into blocks for burning , perhaps with an accelerant added. What do you people do with them ??
Cheers n Beers :-)
Hi Brian, Here's a few suggestions. Guess I'm seasoned, tho some say I'm seasoned with alum and gall. It's not so.
Green persimmon to pucker the frowns of chronic gripers
Pine to smoke out bees
Walnut to kill pretty flowers
Ash to line garden paths
Maple to bed down horses
Mesquite to flavor barbecue
Stinkwood to absorb inconvenient hothouse gases that keep us warm
Silkoak to enhance little girl's curls
For everything else hide in the middle of the garbage can to sneak shavings into the land fill. That is, if you can't put them on your neighbor's curb at midnight. :)
Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter
As always Arch is right on target. If you happen to live in the southern Indiana area.........close to Louiville Ky, my mom and dad will take them to bed down their 14 horses. They never have too much sawdust and shavings. Find a horse farm near you and they will keep you cleaned out of them. Lyndell
Well I just wait until my Record spacious vacuum bag is full then put the lot into the recycling bin for the dustman who will turn it into compost and sell the results back to me for my garden.
Why, I hear you ask am I not cutting out the middle man? Well I used to until 10 weeks ago when I found that our local rat population needed somewhere to live where there was warmth and fresh peelings etc. and chose my compost bin to do it in, I made it homeless!!!!!
In message , brian white writes
Me, I now set them out for the trash (green trash). I tryed the compost thing for a while till I heard banging on the door from the fire dept. late at night. There is a thing called spontaneous combustion and some one could see red glowing from my back yard and this is from some one who is paranoid about oily rags. I would not want the rat thing either.
Bruce
robert strudwick wrote:
Brian,
I use mine for mulch around the flowers and bushes. Usually I end up mixing them in the soil because the natural wood color doesn't really look that good around flowers and bushes. So a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try something different. Mulch chips you buy are dyed - so why not dye my chips? Couldn't find a bottle large enough in the color I wanted (brown) but they did have a small container of RIT black dye. What the heck, $3 for a bottle of dye to do some experimenting. Had 3 large containers (45 gal bags) of primarily pine chips to experiment with from my basement remodel.
Used a 35 gal metal trash can and I poured 5 gal of hot tap water into and then added 1/2 bottle of dye. Slowly started pouring in the shavings and mixing with a long stick. Let it set for awhile (1 hr) after stirring and sure enough, I had black mulch chips. Simply scooped them out with a shovel, wait while the water runs off the shovel and then placed them in the flower bed.
After scooping them out, I had about 3 gallons of water still in the can. Added the rest of the dye and a few more gallons of hot water. Same drill and had another batch of black chips. There were some hardwood chips in one of the bags and everything except the maple took the dye.
Now black chips do not look that good against the dark brown soil but as an experiment - it worked. Didn't require that much effort and was reasonably inexpensive for the amount of mulch (chips) I used. I'll be turning the blacks chips into the soil and looking for a dark brown dye for the next batch. RIT states their dye is environmentally friendly but if all my flowers in that bed croak next spring......
In our area, we used to be able to set bags of chips and sawdust out with the trash and they would pick it up each week. But now, they'll only take it when they pick up leaves, tree limbs, etc. which is twice a year. Waiting on them means my biodegradables got to be a big pile. So I purchased a Mighty Mac 5hp mulcher/shredder and grind up all the tree trimmings, leaves, etc. and mix with sawdust / chips to build up around my flower beds. Some woods, like walnut are not good around flowers I'm told. May be others but I use mainly white oak, poplar, ash, maple and pine.
May be a good opportunity for you to start a flower bed or a compost bin to spread on the lawn - or give it to your neighbors who do have a garden or want some mulch once in awhile.
I've never heard anyone in this ng tell about successfully making chips into fire logs or fire starters. Some melted paraffin and wood chips pressed into a mold should be easy enough to do but I've never tried it.
Bob S.
I take the dry ones, roll big Doobies with newsprint and use them for fire starters. Something I need until mid December, after which the fire never goes out. The wet ones go to the horse people ( birch,beech, maple ), the chicken people ( cherry, oak ), the rabbit people (pine, cedar) or the compost heap, where I have no problem with rats because I have two six foot and better pine snakes that regularly breed there.
My garden is fed by my neighbor's fall barn cleaning every year, but the composted returns from the other folks are a nice addition.
Pillar candles burn down leaving thin sides or the sides melt faster than the flame can burn the paraffin so I cut the edges off, melt them down, mix with sawdust, shavings, small cut offs etc. and pack into paper tubes from TP and paper towel rolls. Not much paraffin is needed, just enough for a thin coating. You have to work fast as the paraffin begins to cool as soon as the chips hit it. I then use them as fire starters when camping. They are not the prettiest of fire starters but one of them is all that is needed to dry out slightly damp wood and get a nice fire going in no time. I cut the paper towel rolls in half.
Make a compost anyway. Don't you have any shrubs, trees, perennials, annuals on your property? I have blueberry bushes and keep them mulched with sawdust that has be "aged" outdoors for a year. The sawdust decreases its volume greatly and generates heat when it starts to rot, adding grass clippings (or nitrogen) speeds up the process.
Jack,
Great idea.
Bob S.
I guess I will add my method, since no-one else has mentioned it. I have a potter friend that does wood-pit firing, she takes all the chips I can produce
I compost the chips with a mix of kitchen scraps, lawn clippings (not much this year on account of little rainfall), and horse flop. Our garden has a couple of raised beds and some of the chips are dumped between the beds. Something I have not tried is to mix some fertilizer with the chips. We all know that chips are somewhat nitrogen deficient and that nitrogen helps out with decomposition. I figure a cup per wheelbarrow full of chips is about right. Mix the chips and fertilizer in a wheelbarrow, dump and then hose down.
Is Raku an option? The japanese invented this technique a few hundred years ago. You put the ceramic piece staright out of the oven into a pile of shavings. These ignite and offer a wide range of temperature over the surface, usually cracking the glaze in a decorative fashion. Find a raku artist and donate... Max sample link:
Give them to blondes as jig saw puzzles?
I used to use them for mulch when we lived in the States, if I have that term right.. A couple of inches in flower beds and around trees to slow evaporation and retain moisture?
Living in the desert now, I just bag them up and trash them..
OH! I do remember a few "pyro nights" when we has a fire in the pit and I had a few bags of pine shavings that had dried well... lol
mac
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Damn... I never thought of that... I know some folks that have 4 horses!
mac
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Hi Max63, Thanks for posting about 'raku'. At last I've found some craft/artists with a worse 'save percentage' than mine. I thought of a 'haiku' about my losses, but if I posted it, I'd be persecuted by M15. :)
Turn to Safety, Arch Fortiter
Here in Milton Keynes I know a couple of people who have bought their own little areas of woodland where they have build a composting toilet to use whilst they are on site. So all my shavings go to them, as they wont work without them. hotfoot.
I have a friend with chickens. Used to have ducks too, but they quit laying eggs so went the way of the stew pot. These things happen. Anyway, I just bag up my shavings and give them to him for bedding. Up here straw is about $5 a bail so it saves him a bundle and I get rid of the shavings w/o any hassle...
...Kevin
I also have a friend that has fancy chickens and ducks and some geese that run free, he takes all I have when he comes by, and brings a couple of dozen eggs along for us, small eggs and some have a blueish shell, very nice eggs. Also have some neighbors that use any they can get from me for their garden paths and also for mulching, hardly any left for ourselves, at times.:-)) Have fun and take care Leeo Van Der Loo
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