Does anyone use downed trees for shavings? Is it worth the expense and hassle of putting them through a chipper? We had a bad storm and lost 5 coniferous trees. Don’t know what kind they are, but they smell wonderful. Are there any hazards/downsides to this? Thanks!
What you get from the chipper will be chips, not shavings.
It is best to know what type of tree something is before using it for bedding.
Ignoring all those issues, the shavings you buy are kiln dried which makes them totally dried and more absorbent.
1 Like
Freshly chipped trees will get HOT as they decompose. That’s why you don’t put fresh mulch on plants. The heat will kill them. If you had the stall deeply bedded with fresh chips you could run the risk of burning down your barn. :eek: So you would need a way to dry them and just piling them up somewhere won’t work because then they will compost. (And still be a fire hazard while they are composting)
1 Like
Around here a day’s rental on a chipper capable of taking a 6" limb will go for about $150. It will drink more than a gal. of gas/hour if run hard. And you will get chips, not shavings. I don’t believe there is a control that lets you vary the size of the output.
How many bags of shavings can you buy for $175 or so you’d pay for a day of chipping?
Remember that you’ll be chipping the limbs, not the logs.
We cleared 1500 feet fenceline last year and made a lot of chips that would have been completely unsuitable for stall bedding.
G.
1 Like
If horses stand on wood from a black walnut tree, they can founder.
https://www.chronofhorse.com/forum/forum/discussion-forums/horse-care/314156-just-how-toxic-is-black-walnut
1 Like
do not use it if it is a Yew tree.
You will probably get more value at cutting the trees for firewood. They are going to have to be cute down to small load anyway
1 Like
The only good use I have seen for freshly chipped limbs (tree, not human!) is to lay on a pathway.
2 Likes
The chips you buy are also treated with a flame inhibitor and if set on fire produce little if any flame…
2 Likes
Tree species matters and yes, green chips from the machine are going to get hot as they compost. The shavings typically used for stall bedding are from kiln dried material (typically pine) and are often a by-product of manufacturing wooden “stuff”.
1 Like
I would not recommend testing that theory inside your barn
1 Like
Thanks everyone. Currently, we get our chips from Tractor Supply and they’re $5.29 for 8 cf. Once we get our fence up, we won’t need to stall the horses at night (except for really cold nights, hard rain, etc). I definitely appreciate the insight!
There is a landscape company locally that has a HUGE grinder that takes whole logs and shreds them into bedding sized pieces. They sell it as bedding and it works fine (I used to buy it until I moved), though I think they use older, dead trees for bedding and the fresher ones get used for mulch (they also make their own, including dyed mulch). FWIW, the owner uses if for her own horses and is careful with the species they use for bedding.
1 Like
I tried something like that. I had a bunch of old cedar trees that came down in a storm. So I got the bright idea to rent the big honking chipper shredder from Home Depot and make cedar mulch with the smaller limbs.
I got it home. It wouldn’t start. Turns out there was a lever you had to move that was not on the directions. That wasted an hour of the rental time. I started chipping away with the limbs. It said it would chip up to 6 inches but the biggest limbs I put in were less than 4 inches in diameter. It kept clogging up and finally would not feed at all despite running it in reverse. I took it back to Home Depot. For the $300 rental fee I got a pile of mulch that will fit in one wheelbarrow. The rest of the stuff is getting hauled up to the upper 40 to biodegrade. What I got was just chips and some of them were big chips. Not suitable for bedding at all.
1 Like
green wood is about 40% moisture content on its own, so it will not be absorbent. Besides I guarantee it will take more than $6 of your time, chipper fuel expenses, etc to produce 8ft3n from a residential-sized chipper.
If you need to get rid of that fallen tree, hire a tree care company to bring their big tub grinder over, those things can swallow logs without so much as a burp.
1 Like
