Woods Chips for the Compost Pile

Hello,

I've only been composting for about 2 years now, and I'm getting more interested in it. I've been listening to Charles Dowding quite a lot lately. One thing he does is he chips small limbs with an electric chipper. He says that wood chips add value to compost due to the presence of bacteria on the chips for longer periods of time (that's how I understand it anyway).

So my question is, does anyone know of a better way to get wood chips, preferably through a means that doesn't involve electricity or gas-powered processes?

I suppose chopping wood by hand would do the trick, but I'm not looking to chop wood just to make chips.

You might want to try this free service.

I suggest using caution about which chips you will accept though.

It takes a long time to break down wood chips so it’s nice to leave a pile for a year and then use it - which dowsing does. Look up bioreactor for some interesting wood chip composting ideas too.

My local landfill lets you get wood chips for free. There are a few things to be aware of, though:

You must bring your own truck. And pitchforks. Sometimes there's a guy who will use a wheel loader to dump a bunch into the bed of our truck. But we are always prepared to do the work ourselves.

We get what we get. No species options. Just get that pitchfork into the pile and start pitching it!

We sometimes get Asian roaches. We deal with it...bugs are a way of life down here in the South.

However, the very most convenient delivery option for us is a tree service who clears utility lines. They are happy to dump their trucks on our property, because it saves them the landfill fees. Maybe keep your eyes open for tree service companies?

We've also had a delivery from an arborist who removed storm-damaged trees. They also preferred to dump their trucks on our property to save on landfill fees.

I did sign up for the chipdrop.com service. For whatever unknown reason, they never contacted me. This was after waiting for about a year. So we pursued other avenues. We found contacting companies directly to be our best resource.