Tilth, Humus and Compost

Let me state my bias stright away:

There is nothing, but nothing, as important as having adequate amounts of organic material in your soil.

Biological activity

Soil is alive - and it has to be for plants to thrive. There is a complex relationship between the creatures (micro-organisms, insects, scavengers, predators) and the plants (green and fungal) that live in the soil. They are involved together in the dance of nutrients that make a garden grow.

Water retention and air retention

Heavy, clay soil can get so soggy that our plants suffer from having wet "feet". Growing in pure sand would give us great drainage, but we would have to water and fertilize constantly to replace what was flowing through and out to the ocean.

In the soil, "where the action is" is in the microscopically thin film of water that surrounds soil particles. This is where the biological work happens and where most of the soil micro-oganisms live.

A soil with good tilth has soil particles bound together in tiny clumps that maximize the area for the water film to adhere to, yet leave spaces between the clumps for air. This prevents roots from being waterlogged, but provides plenty of moisture for the root hairs to tap for the plant's use.

Texture

With the incorporation of sufficient organic material, the texture of the soil improves. Heavy clay soils will gain the air spaces they lack, and sandy soils will gain the water retention they desprately need. A soil with good organic texture will resist caking or hardening of the surface after heavy rains and in hot weather (see Mulches, below, for more on this).

The "squeeze" test is a good way to check your soil's texture. Grab a handful of moist but not wet soil, and squeeze it in your hand. When you open your hand, the ball of soil should hold itself together, but readily crumble when you poke it with a finger. If it flows through your fingers as soon as you open your fist, it's too sandy. If it stays in a compressed ball and has to be broken apart by brute force, it's too clayey. Either way, adding organic material in the form of compost or manure will greatly improve things.

Nutrients

With all due respect to hydroponic growers, I don't believe that an exclusive diet of soluable fertilizers makes for the healthiest plants (for example, I suppose I could live on nothing but sugar water and vitamin pills, but I wouldn't feel very good about it). Not only that, fertilizing continually gets too expensive.

The alternative is to feed the soil with ingredients that will break down over time and slowly release the nutrients that our plants take from the soil. This breakdown of compost, mulch, and non-soluable minerals and fertilizers requires biological action in the soil, together with sufficient air and water retention. The beauty of this is that a well-fed biological system tends to achieve an equilibrium - a beneficial balance of available nutrients without large swings of excess or depletion.

Our clay-based soil contains plenty of mineral nutrients, but bound so tightly to the clay particles that the plants can't access them. Creating good biological activity and tilth allows these nutrients to be released and made available for plants.

Compost, Manure and Mulch

Our most effective way of maintaining soil biological activity, moisture, texture and nutrients is to incorporate organic materials into the soil on a regular basis. We can dig in compost and manure in the off- season and when planting or building new beds. On established beds, we can layer it on top of the soil as mulch.

Compost which is well broken down (it'll be crumbly brown, and you won't be able to identify the original ingredients) is a very mild fertilizer. Its value is in providing trace elements and minerals, improving the texture of the soil and promoting biological activity. Don't rely on compost alone to give your plants a nitrogen boost in the spring - for spring fertilizing, add an organic fertilizer mix to your soil together with the compost. The biological action introduced with the compost will release the nutrients from the organic fertilizer mix.

Manure can be used in the compost as a nitrogen source, and can be used directly in the soil or as a mulch. If you are spreading manure directly onto the garden, make sure that the manure has been aged, perferably a year or more. Even so, avoid manuring beds where root vegetables will be grown immediately. It will make carrots "hairy" with rootlets, and there is a small but real chance of bacterial contamination of vegetables grown directly in manure.

Fresh manure is a little too strong for the garden bed; it should go into the compost pile where its heating action will benefit the composting process. The exception is when you are establishing new beds in the fall for spring planting - if you till in the manure, overwintering in the soil will stabilize it by spring.

Look carefully at the composition of manure: most manure is horse or cow manure with bedding - usually sawdust or straw. The bedding has two purposes; it is a source of carbon for your composting, and it soaks up the livestock's urine, which is the major contributor of nitrogen. If the manure has excessive amounts of dry bedding, the carbon content will be too high for balanced decomposition, and it may actually act as a net consumer of nitrogen, as the bacteria are forced to draw nitrogen out of the soil to aid in the breakdown of the excess carbon. Ideally, the bedding in the manure should be damp and crumbly, indicating that its carbon has already started to break down.

Mulch can technically be any material that is laid on top of the soil to protect it from sun, rain, pests and weeds. The most important function of a mulch is to act as an insulator - this reduces the evaporation of water from the soil, allowing us to water less, and protecting our plants' roots from both drought and heat stress. A mulch will also protect the soil from packing down under heavy rain, and from crusting and cracking in hot sun.

Some people use plastic, landscape cloth, bark or stones as mulch, and each has its uses. I prefer to use an organic mulch that will be broken down and carried into the soil to add nutrients and texture.

A high carbon mulch like paper, sawdust, buckwheat hulls, shredded corn cobs or straw will consume nitrogen as it breaks down. These mulches are best suited for paths, where their main functions will be deterring weeds and conserving moisture, and where the nitrogen drain won't concern our plants. We mulch paths with a layer of newspaper and a top layer of straw or sawdust plus grass clippings (for nitrogen). After a year in the paths, it is sufficiently broken down to turn over into the vegetable beds as compost, and a new layer of path mulch added.

One disadvantage to loose mulches like straw is that they provide a shady, moist environment for slugs and rodents to live in.

A balanced mulch such as rotted compost, leaf mould or aged manure can be spread directly on garden beds in between the plants. These mulches will start adding nutrients right away, and will not drain nitrogen from the soil. For an ornamental bed, they give a very attractive, consistent and natural colour to the soil surface, which I find more appealing than bark or artificial mulch. As they break down into the soil, they add organic matter and biological activity. This is a real plus for established perennial beds which we don't have the opportunity to dig over each year.

The disadvantage of balanced mulches is that they do not do much to deter weeds (although their loose texture makes pulling weeds easy) and they need renewing fairly frequently as they break down into the soil.

Whenever we add a mulch, we also fertilize with a complete organic mix fertilizer, which will ensure long-term release of balanced nutrients under the mulch.

Compost

The bywords of compost making are:
Size, Mix, Water and Air
Size has two aspects: the material to be composted should be chopped or shredded as small as practical - small particles have more surface area for the bacteria and fungi to start breaking down the material.

Size also means the critical size for the pile - the first stage of composting involves bacteria that generates and thrives in heat (thermophilic)- if the pile is too small, it may not retain sufficient heat or it may dry out in the sun, either of which will slow the composting process down.

Mix means two things as well: the mix of materials should provide a balance of nutrients to the compost - generally a ratio of 3 parts nitrogen (fresh green things) to one part carbon (dry, brown or woody things).

Mix also means that the different ingredients of the pile should be mixed together well, so that the different nutrients are available in all parts of the pile for efficient biological action.

Water and Air means that the pile must remain moist but not soggy, and that air must be available inside the pile for the composting process. The best way of ensuring this is to turn the pile over periodically - the digging and re-layering will allow air into the portions of the pile that had gotten packed down. At the same time you can see if the pile is moist, and add some water if it is not.

If a compost pile is slimy or smells like rotten eggs, this means that the aerobic (air breathing) bacteria in the pile have been starved for air and have died, leaving the non-air breathing bacteria to continue decomposition. Unfortunately, these anerobic bacteria produce sulphurous gases as a waste product which give the "rotten egg" smell.

The neighbors think I'm crazy.
Every fall, they see me out on the boulevard with the lawn mower, mowing the grass and sucking up all the fallen leaves. I even ask their permission to mow their lawns for them. While they're looking at me funny, all I can think of is "look at all this wonderful, free fertilizer!"

The mixture of grass clippings and chopped leaves that comes out of the lawn mower's catcher bag is pure dynamite for the compost - fresh, damp and a well mixed balance of Carbon and Nitrogen.

I put it into the compost pile layered with the fall cleanup's shredded trimmings and a sprinkle of dirt, until the pile will hold no more. Then I fill garden garbage bags with the shredded leaf-grass mixture to overwinter as a ready carbon source to mix with the grass clippings in the compost next spring.

If I get the mixture of grass and leaves and moisture right, by the time I open the garbage bag the next spring or summer, it's already turned into chocolatey brown leaf mould and worm castings, which can be put straight onto the garden as mulch or incorporated into potting mix.

I received a crappy birthday present from my parents last year:
When I looked out the window in the morning, there were 19 garbage bags ranged on our front lawn, each with a masking tape letter on it, spelling

"H-A-P-P-Y . B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y
T-R-E-V-O-R"

On closer inspection, each bag turned out to be full of horse manure and leaves - Contrary to what you might have thought, I was thrilled.

If anybody had told me ten years ago that I would one day gaze longingly at a pile of mouldy oak leaves and consider it a thing of beauty, I would have told them they were nuts.

Shredding
Once the composting bug has bitten you, you'll find the sheer volume of leaves, twigs, flower stalks and other free nutrients (otherwise known as garden waste) becomes too much to chop by hand or with the family lawn mower. You are now ready to graduate to that most serious of composting tools, the chipper-shredder.

My introduction to shredders came through renting them - for two years running, on the Rememberance Day holicay we rented a shredder and munched down our collected pile of material. Both years, the appointed day arrived with torrential rain*. Having spent $ 50 per day on rental, abstinence was not an option, so there we stood in the rain, feeding tree branches and leaves into a shredder that clogged every three minutes and required stopping, disassembly and restarting.

(*Note: The tradition was in danger of being broken this year - it didn't rain! My wife volunteered to turn the sprinkler on me just to keep the streak going, but I declined... fortunately, just as I was finishing up, we got a light rain, so it is now six years in a row...)

By the third year, I had vowed that things would change. We went shopping for a shredder of our own.

We quickly determined that the small electric units were not going to stand up to the work we envisioned. Not only did we want the capability to chip branches up to an inch and a half in diameter, we wanted to be able to shred large, damp maple leaves without choking the machine. Our choice was a Sears Craftsman 5 horsepower gasoline powered unit. One hint: buy the extended warranty with your shredder - this will give you annual tune ups for free, and also covers parts like the blades and hammers, which will normally wear out with use.

TIPS:

1) I generally leave my "shreddables" stacked in an old cold frame until there is enough for an hour's worth of shredding. No sense firing up the motor and annoying the neighbors every few days. Of course, if I'm lucky, the bottom half of the stack will have composted naturally by the time I get around to it. 'Course, this also leads to some "interesting" textures and smells with half-rotted I-don't-know-what slurping down the chute...

2) When people ask me what I use for slugs, I tell them "My 5 HP Shredder. One trip through this baby, and that slug is not coming back for more delphiniums, that's for sure".

3) When we shred mint, lavender, lemon balm and sage trimmings, you can smell the fragrance down the block.

4) Some things shred better than others. Think linear when feeding the shreddables into the maw of the machine. In shredder terms, bushy is bad, streamlined is good.

Some plants are incredibly fibrous, like iris swords, and tend to string out rather than cut. I admit that I have sacrificed some fineness of the finished product for speed; I found that the metal exit grill (which keeps material circulating until it is chopped to a small size) tended to get clogged too often with grasses and other fibrous material. I have removed the grill and now let the shredded material exit on the first revolution, which eliminates the stopping to untangle the clogs, however it does result in a larger particle. If the chunks are too big, I'll scoop 'em up and feed 'em through again.

5) I set up the shredder in front of the compost pile and blow the end product directly in, which also saves me from emptying the catcher bag all the time.

6) Don't shred roses, diseased tree trimmings or blighted tomatoes. Don't shred morning glory or other rhizomous rooting weeds because you'll get millions of 'em for the price of one. Try to shred your weeds before they set seed.

7) Alternate your materials wet vs. dry, green vs. brown, soft vs. woody so you get a good mix of carbon and nitrogen coming out of the spout.

8) Some words of shredding safety advice.

Wear your protective goggles, gloves and hearing protection (Eh? What's that you say?). Long sleeves and pants are also a good idea. Even a small speck of dirt exiting the spout at 100 mph hurts when intercepted by an arm or leg.

Stand to the side of the chute as you feed and DON'T look straight down the chute to see what's jamming. The blades kick back rocks and debris all the time and you'll get it in the face.

Keep aside some sturdy twigs or strong, long stalks to use as "pusher sticks" to encourage clumps of shreddables down the chute. This will also help avoid the use of your hands anywhere near the blades. Finished wood (like a garden stake) is too hard for this purpose, because your pusher stick will get chopped by the blades as well as the shreddables you are pushing, and the leaf shredding blades are not made to stand up to woody material larger than a pencil. Put any woody stems and branches through the chipper section.

9) Don't feed a chunk of woody material into the chipper just before shutting off (or just before runnning out of gas) - give chipping material lots of time to be chewed up. If you don't, chances are, the chipper blade will come to a halt embedded in a piece of wood and jam the narrow throat of the chipper chute. This means a lot of work and unkind words to disassemble the machine to unclog the blade.

10) And last, but not least, think about your mouth. As in - keep it closed. Why? Remember the kick back from the blades? If you walk about with your mouth hanging open, guess where whatever's-being-kicked-out will go? As for the quality of the taste sensation, I refer you to tips 1) and 2) above...

© 1998 Trevor Inkpen

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Let me state my bias stright away: There is nothing, but nothing, as important as having adequate amounts of organic material in your soil. Biological activity Soil is alive - and it has to be for plants to thrive. There is a complex relationship between the creatures (micro-organisms, insects, scavengers, predators) and the plants (green and fungal) that live in the soil. They are involved together in the dance of nutrients that make a garden grow. Water retention and air retention Heavy, clay soil can get so soggy that our plants suffer from having wet "feet". Growing in pure sand would give us great drainage, but we would have to water and fertilize constantly to replace what was flowing through and out to the ocean. In the soil, "where the action is" is in the microscopically thin film of water that surrounds soil particles. This is where the biological work happens and where most of the soil micro-oganisms live. A soil with good tilth has soil particles bound together in tiny clumps that maximize the area for the water film to adhere to, yet leave spaces between the clumps for air. This prevents roots from being waterlogged, but provides plenty of moisture for the root hairs to tap for the plant's use. Texture With the incorporation of sufficient organic material, the texture of the soil improves. Heavy clay soils will gain the air spaces they lack, and sandy soils will gain the water retention they desprately need. A soil with good organic texture will resist caking or hardening of the surface after heavy rains and in hot weather (see Mulches, below, for more on this). The "squeeze" test is a good way to check your soil's texture. Grab a handful of moist but not wet soil, and squeeze it in your hand. When you open your hand, the ball of soil should hold itself together, but readily crumble when you poke it with a finger. If it flows through your fingers as soon as you open your fist, it's too sandy. If it stays in a compressed ball and has to be broken apart by brute force, it's too clayey. Either way, adding organic material in the form of compost or manure will greatly improve things. Nutrients With all due respect to hydroponic growers, I don't believe that an exclusive diet of soluable fertilizers makes for the healthiest plants (for example, I suppose I could live on nothing but sugar water and vitamin pills, but I wouldn't feel very good about it). Not only that, fertilizing continually gets too expensive. The alternative is to feed the soil with ingredients that will break down over time and slowly release the nutrients that our plants take from the soil. This breakdown of compost, mulch, and non-soluable minerals and fertilizers requires biological action in the soil, together with sufficient air and water retention. The beauty of this is that a well-fed biological system tends to achieve an equilibrium - a beneficial balance of available nutrients without large swings of excess or depletion. Our clay-based soil contains plenty of mineral nutrients, but bound so tightly to the clay particles that the plants can't access them. Creating good biological activity and tilth allows these nutrients to be released and made available for plants. Compost, Manure and Mulch Our most effective way of maintaining soil biological activity, moisture, texture and nutrients is to incorporate organic materials into the soil on a regular basis. We can dig in compost and manure in the off- season and when planting or building new beds. On established beds, we can layer it on top of the soil as mulch. Compost which is well broken down (it'll be crumbly brown, and you won't be able to identify the original ingredients) is a very mild fertilizer. Its value is in providing trace elements and minerals, improving the texture of the soil and promoting biological activity. Don't rely on compost alone to give your plants a nitrogen boost in the spring - for spring fertilizing, add an organic fertilizer mix to your soil together with the compost. The biological action introduced with the compost will release the nutrients from the organic fertilizer mix. Manure can be used in the compost as a nitrogen source, and can be used directly in the soil or as a mulch. If you are spreading manure directly onto the garden, make sure that the manure has been aged, perferably a year or more. Even so, avoid manuring beds where root vegetables will be grown immediately. It will make carrots "hairy" with rootlets, and there is a small but real chance of bacterial contamination of vegetables grown directly in manure. Fresh manure is a little too strong for the garden bed; it should go into the compost pile where its heating action will benefit the composting process. The exception is when you are establishing new beds in the fall for spring planting - if you till in the manure, overwintering in the soil will stabilize it by spring. Look carefully at the composition of manure: most manure is horse or cow manure with bedding - usually sawdust or straw. The bedding has two purposes; it is a source of carbon for your composting, and it soaks up the livestock's urine, which is the major contributor of nitrogen. If the manure has excessive amounts of dry bedding, the carbon content will be too high for balanced decomposition, and it may actually act as a net consumer of nitrogen, as the bacteria are forced to draw nitrogen out of the soil to aid in the breakdown of the excess carbon. Ideally, the bedding in the manure should be damp and crumbly, indicating that its carbon has already started to break down. Mulch can technically be any material that is laid on top of the soil to protect it from sun, rain, pests and weeds. The most important function of a mulch is to act as an insulator - this reduces the evaporation of water from the soil, allowing us to water less, and protecting our plants' roots from both drought and heat stress. A mulch will also protect the soil from packing down under heavy rain, and from crusting and cracking in hot sun. Some people use plastic, landscape cloth, bark or stones as mulch, and each has its uses. I prefer to use an organic mulch that will be broken down and carried into the soil to add nutrients and texture. A high carbon mulch like paper, sawdust, buckwheat hulls, shredded corn cobs or straw will consume nitrogen as it breaks down. These mulches are best suited for paths, where their main functions will be deterring weeds and conserving moisture, and where the nitrogen drain won't concern our plants. We mulch paths with a layer of newspaper and a top layer of straw or sawdust plus grass clippings (for nitrogen). After a year in the paths, it is sufficiently broken down to turn over into the vegetable beds as compost, and a new layer of path mulch added. One disadvantage to loose mulches like straw is that they provide a shady, moist environment for slugs and rodents to live in. A balanced mulch such as rotted compost, leaf mould or aged manure can be spread directly on garden beds in between the plants. These mulches will start adding nutrients right away, and will not drain nitrogen from the soil. For an ornamental bed, they give a very attractive, consistent and natural colour to the soil surface, which I find more appealing than bark or artificial mulch. As they break down into the soil, they add organic matter and biological activity. This is a real plus for established perennial beds which we don't have the opportunity to dig over each year. The disadvantage of balanced mulches is that they do not do much to deter weeds (although their loose texture makes pulling weeds easy) and they need renewing fairly frequently as they break down into the soil. Whenever we add a mulch, we also fertilize with a complete organic mix fertilizer, which will ensure long-term release of balanced nutrients under the mulch.		Compost
		The bywords of compost making are: Size, Mix, Water and Air Size has two aspects: the material to be composted should be chopped or shredded as small as practical - small particles have more surface area for the bacteria and fungi to start breaking down the material. Size also means the critical size for the pile - the first stage of composting involves bacteria that generates and thrives in heat (thermophilic)- if the pile is too small, it may not retain sufficient heat or it may dry out in the sun, either of which will slow the composting process down. Mix means two things as well: the mix of materials should provide a balance of nutrients to the compost - generally a ratio of 3 parts nitrogen (fresh green things) to one part carbon (dry, brown or woody things). Mix also means that the different ingredients of the pile should be mixed together well, so that the different nutrients are available in all parts of the pile for efficient biological action. Water and Air means that the pile must remain moist but not soggy, and that air must be available inside the pile for the composting process. The best way of ensuring this is to turn the pile over periodically - the digging and re-layering will allow air into the portions of the pile that had gotten packed down. At the same time you can see if the pile is moist, and add some water if it is not. If a compost pile is slimy or smells like rotten eggs, this means that the aerobic (air breathing) bacteria in the pile have been starved for air and have died, leaving the non-air breathing bacteria to continue decomposition. Unfortunately, these anerobic bacteria produce sulphurous gases as a waste product which give the "rotten egg" smell.

		The neighbors think I'm crazy. Every fall, they see me out on the boulevard with the lawn mower, mowing the grass and sucking up all the fallen leaves. I even ask their permission to mow their lawns for them. While they're looking at me funny, all I can think of is "look at all this wonderful, free fertilizer!" The mixture of grass clippings and chopped leaves that comes out of the lawn mower's catcher bag is pure dynamite for the compost - fresh, damp and a well mixed balance of Carbon and Nitrogen. I put it into the compost pile layered with the fall cleanup's shredded trimmings and a sprinkle of dirt, until the pile will hold no more. Then I fill garden garbage bags with the shredded leaf-grass mixture to overwinter as a ready carbon source to mix with the grass clippings in the compost next spring. If I get the mixture of grass and leaves and moisture right, by the time I open the garbage bag the next spring or summer, it's already turned into chocolatey brown leaf mould and worm castings, which can be put straight onto the garden as mulch or incorporated into potting mix.

		I received a crappy birthday present from my parents last year: When I looked out the window in the morning, there were 19 garbage bags ranged on our front lawn, each with a masking tape letter on it, spelling "H-A-P-P-Y . B-I-R-T-H-D-A-Y T-R-E-V-O-R" On closer inspection, each bag turned out to be full of horse manure and leaves - Contrary to what you might have thought, I was thrilled. If anybody had told me ten years ago that I would one day gaze longingly at a pile of mouldy oak leaves and consider it a thing of beauty, I would have told them they were nuts.

		Shredding Once the composting bug has bitten you, you'll find the sheer volume of leaves, twigs, flower stalks and other free nutrients (otherwise known as garden waste) becomes too much to chop by hand or with the family lawn mower. You are now ready to graduate to that most serious of composting tools, the chipper-shredder. My introduction to shredders came through renting them - for two years running, on the Rememberance Day holicay we rented a shredder and munched down our collected pile of material. Both years, the appointed day arrived with torrential rain. Having spent $ 50 per day on rental, abstinence was not an option, so there we stood in the rain, feeding tree branches and leaves into a shredder that clogged every three minutes and required stopping, disassembly and restarting. (Note: The tradition was in danger of being broken this year - it didn't rain! My wife volunteered to turn the sprinkler on me just to keep the streak going, but I declined... fortunately, just as I was finishing up, we got a light rain, so it is now six years in a row...) By the third year, I had vowed that things would change. We went shopping for a shredder of our own. We quickly determined that the small electric units were not going to stand up to the work we envisioned. Not only did we want the capability to chip branches up to an inch and a half in diameter, we wanted to be able to shred large, damp maple leaves without choking the machine. Our choice was a Sears Craftsman 5 horsepower gasoline powered unit. One hint: buy the extended warranty with your shredder - this will give you annual tune ups for free, and also covers parts like the blades and hammers, which will normally wear out with use. TIPS: 1) I generally leave my "shreddables" stacked in an old cold frame until there is enough for an hour's worth of shredding. No sense firing up the motor and annoying the neighbors every few days. Of course, if I'm lucky, the bottom half of the stack will have composted naturally by the time I get around to it. 'Course, this also leads to some "interesting" textures and smells with half-rotted I-don't-know-what slurping down the chute... 2) When people ask me what I use for slugs, I tell them "My 5 HP Shredder. One trip through this baby, and that slug is not coming back for more delphiniums, that's for sure". 3) When we shred mint, lavender, lemon balm and sage trimmings, you can smell the fragrance down the block. 4) Some things shred better than others. Think linear when feeding the shreddables into the maw of the machine. In shredder terms, bushy is bad, streamlined is good. Some plants are incredibly fibrous, like iris swords, and tend to string out rather than cut. I admit that I have sacrificed some fineness of the finished product for speed; I found that the metal exit grill (which keeps material circulating until it is chopped to a small size) tended to get clogged too often with grasses and other fibrous material. I have removed the grill and now let the shredded material exit on the first revolution, which eliminates the stopping to untangle the clogs, however it does result in a larger particle. If the chunks are too big, I'll scoop 'em up and feed 'em through again. 5) I set up the shredder in front of the compost pile and blow the end product directly in, which also saves me from emptying the catcher bag all the time. 6) Don't shred roses, diseased tree trimmings or blighted tomatoes. Don't shred morning glory or other rhizomous rooting weeds because you'll get millions of 'em for the price of one. Try to shred your weeds before they set seed. 7) Alternate your materials wet vs. dry, green vs. brown, soft vs. woody so you get a good mix of carbon and nitrogen coming out of the spout. 8) Some words of shredding safety advice. Wear your protective goggles, gloves and hearing protection (Eh? What's that you say?). Long sleeves and pants are also a good idea. Even a small speck of dirt exiting the spout at 100 mph hurts when intercepted by an arm or leg. Stand to the side of the chute as you feed and DON'T look straight down the chute to see what's jamming. The blades kick back rocks and debris all the time and you'll get it in the face. Keep aside some sturdy twigs or strong, long stalks to use as "pusher sticks" to encourage clumps of shreddables down the chute. This will also help avoid the use of your hands anywhere near the blades. Finished wood (like a garden stake) is too hard for this purpose, because your pusher stick will get chopped by the blades as well as the shreddables you are pushing, and the leaf shredding blades are not made to stand up to woody material larger than a pencil. Put any woody stems and branches through the chipper section. 9) Don't feed a chunk of woody material into the chipper just before shutting off (or just before runnning out of gas) - give chipping material lots of time to be chewed up. If you don't, chances are, the chipper blade will come to a halt embedded in a piece of wood and jam the narrow throat of the chipper chute. This means a lot of work and unkind words to disassemble the machine to unclog the blade. 10) And last, but not least, think about your mouth. As in - keep it closed. Why? Remember the kick back from the blades? If you walk about with your mouth hanging open, guess where whatever's-being-kicked-out will go? As for the quality of the taste sensation, I refer you to tips 1) and 2) above...
© 1998 Trevor Inkpen