Up and Down with the Wood Mulch Pile

In a short span of twenty minutes, I watch as hours and hours of work disappeared. The pile started the day large and beautiful. The light-colored chips from the cottonwoods differentiated themselves from the darker chips from other trees, helping to demonstrate the volume of a single bagful. The pile represented too many bags to accurately estimate, dozens. And each bag represented significant time cutting, sizing, chipping, and dumping to yield the mulch. For anyone who has chipped with a small, 2” chipper/shredder, you already know.

It felt good to bury my hand into the pile where the heat was almost unbearable. The wood was breaking down, preparing itself for burial into the soil structure. That was less than an hour ago. The loss is palpable.

The wood mulch pile, more down than up

We started out the season without any mulch available for spring projects. Last year, Farminater chipped maybe twelve bags of branches and twigs. All of those were now part of the sheet mulch in the kitchen garden.

Then we mulched the branches from much of the tree we are in the process of cutting down. That was used to finish the sheet mulching, cover the hugelkultur border on the kitchen garden, and sprinkled into the compost pile. That pile disappeared as well, hours of chipping going into the soil.

I finished chipping the various remaining piles of brush stacked around the house. They had been there all winter and needed to go. There was some cottonwood remaining, and a lot of other trees like box elder and rocky mountain maple. Those last two were significantly harder to chip, submitting only with reluctance to the 2” chipper chute. Within a few hours they went from being sticks, to being part of a pile, to their burial.

I watch the pile from yesterday moving quickly to create the deep mulch paths in the kitchen garden. It’s hard to see it go, but the garden needs the mulch more

than I.