Privet Cuttings

I have been given 6 cubic meters of privet cuttings! Yay, organic matter!

But...

The branches are too small to go through my chipper (it only chips wood, it clogs up on leaves).
Most of the cuttings are 12inch long or so, I think if I just piled them on as mulch then they'd try to root... what do you think? (the garden I'd be putting them on is newish fruit trees guilds with an inch of wood chip between everything whilst I wait for the plants to grow a bit!)
Will privet on its own make very good compost? I can put them all in a pile- but I don't have anything much else to go in the compost pile, nor will I. I kind of imagine I'll just end up with very rough compost full of sticks that take a decade to break down.

I can't turn down good organic matter, but I also don't really know what to do with it!

Thanks,
Charli

Charli, yeah, I think you're right about those cuttings rooting. But you can pile them on a tarp, wait for the leaves to die and drop off. Then collect the leaves separately and compost them, use them for mulch. Let the sticks die in the sun on that tarp. Once they are dead you can soak them and bury them in a hugel pit.

I hadn't even thought about drying them off first! I shall spread them all out on a tarp, then when they've dried out a bit I can sweep the leaves and smaller twigs into a pile, and the bigger twigs can either be chipped and added to the wood chip, or buried (I do have another hugel to build!)

Thanks!
Charli

We used to have yards and yards of privet hedge and piled the cuttings all over the place and I don't think I ever saw one bit adventitiously rooting. If it did, it wouldn't be very well anchored by the time you noticed it, and you could pull it out again. However, I did quite often run a mower over it before using it as mulch.