Ruud Kleinpaste: Chippering away

Sometimes I feel like the “Labourer” in our household.  

“Darling, can you please dig me a large hole for a Nikau Palm” followed by “pruning the fruit trees” and “covering the soil against blackbirds” or “create a nice pathway”. 

Of course I have my own stuff to do/plant/remove/mow, but once I start the Hansa Chipper I am in my element.  

Branches up to 2 inches in diameter are turned into excellent, fresh and sizeable mulch – stuff that will —in time— be the best organic matter to feed the soil and the plants that grow in situ. But it needs to be managed well.  

Couple of things you can do with this chipping monster and the chips:  

Create a thick layer of wood chips that cover the garden path. It keeps it covered in winter, and it stops a lot of weeds germinating on that path – saves a heap of weeding and keeps the surface relatively dry after winter rain.  

But if you want to create a good mulch for your plants, you’ll need to add some Nitrogen (N).  

Your chipped wood is mainly Carbon. The Nitrogen (in the form of Urea) is needed to turn the Carbon into balanced compost – a handful of Urea per square meter might do the trick.  

Many people that have a compost bin stuff that bin full of lawn clippings, fruit remains, and vegetable matter and stalks, left over from a dinner  

This compost bin is very full of Nitrogen and lacking a decent amount of Carbon —the opposite to the thick layer of wood chips— to be used as “Mulch”. 

You guessed it: this compost bin needs a good amount of Carbon from the chipper to balance the C-N ratio required for a decent plant food fertiliser in the garden  

Generally speaking, the C-N ratio required to make fertile soil should be in the order of 20-1 (up to 30-1). 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks at be rude climb past?

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Is our men in the garden? Hey rude?

Speaker 3 (00:16):
Hello, Jick, I'm not in the garden, no, because it's
too friggin coal.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Yeah, it is your place, totally, Like, is it frozen oither?
How are things looking?

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yeah, no, it's not. Actually we're on the board. Honestly,
we really get frost. But you're not quite love No,
well not quite, that's right. But all the cold air
of goes to go down the hill. Yeah, and we
ended up we end up with something like zero degrees
or maybe one degree. It's okay, dropical, it's yeah, dropical. Right,

(00:44):
Oh my gosh, Hey have you do you have to
ever make pathways in your garden? Pathway between the vegetables. Yeah,
in the between the vegetables.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
You know, I don't know that I do. I mean,
I sort of had my planter boxes, so I keep
most of my planting the things to eat in the air,
and then I have a bit of grass for playing
football on, and then I have the sort of trees
around the outside.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
You know, yeah, exactly. That sounds like it. Now. What
I mean is that quite often in my vegetable garden,
I have, you know, literally little pathways so I can
get into my vegetable garden, and I make those quite
often from chipper wood. Yes, yeah, and that's it's something
that I thoroughly enjoy that to turn that thing on,

(01:28):
you know, it goes on PETRONI And then you can
you can take, if you like, bits of tree drunks
or now not trunks, but branches up to about two
inches in diameter easier, and you put you make them
into into chipped wood basically, and that you can use

(01:50):
to make pathways. And the cool thing with that is,
of course it also stops weeds coming up, which is
very important, so your germination is not happening. But they're great.
So I've got a little hands or quite a big
answer Stuppier, which I've got some steel shop a long
time ago. I love it. But I just realized you
can't just use these chips on the on the floor

(02:12):
of your of your garden, because if you have things
that you grow there, you'll find that the chips themselves
need quite a lot of stuff like nitrogen to actually
make it decay properly. And if you yeah, and this
is very important. So if you've got a layer of

(02:33):
chips in your garden, if you like as a mulch,
always put some of that nitrogen. Do you reform if
you like in it, because if you don't those chips,
actually you will literally take the nitrogen out of the
soil to make it decay itself. But that goes at
the cost of your plants.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Yeah, right, right, Okay.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
It's a bit that's just a bit of chemistry science,
I suppose. So if you if you get those chips
and they are absolutely wonderful for covering stuff, always chuck
some a little bit of urio. You don't have to
be scientific about it. Handful to the squire square meetia.
I loved that handful to the square media whole case.
But you'll find that you will actually, yeah, you get

(03:18):
a lot better system that way.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Fantastic.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
It's really important.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
So I don't know if I've told you I've got
I've got my backyard. I we don't have a fence
with the next door neighbor, so it's kind of like
how life used to be. We've got kind of got
trees down the kind of boundary. But neighbors are wonderful
and it's very relaxed and so and so. Anyway, Lloyd
next door has a chipper, and so I have in

(03:41):
the past been nine to pop over and help them
with a little bit of autumnal chipping so that he
could spread the mulch around his place and around the
communal lemon trees and fijio trees and plum trees and
that kind of thing. So there you go.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
I totally agree with you, because these things are not
terribly cheap, but if you do it together as a
team of neighbors, you are much better off. And and
the other thing you can do with the chips is actually,
if you've got a compost being the thing compostly with
a lot of fruit and stuff like that that needs carbon,
that's where the chipper comes in to put the chips
into the compost bin for that same balance.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yeah, especially if it's all like grass cuppings or similar.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
You really are today?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, nice, look you've got I hope things aren't. Yeah,
I hope things warm up a little bit at some point, though,
I don't know. It's nice to experience seasons, isn't it.
Don't you think it's just nice?

Speaker 3 (04:33):
Very bard Hills.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
Road Climblass, not in the garden for us this morning,
or in the garden in spirit for us this morning.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
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