My own experience is not as fantastic as the video, ie California may be too dry in the summer that slows down the decomposing of chips and irrigation is definitely needed as oppose what the video claims. Otherwise using free fresh wood chip from tree companies has made my life a lot easier.

My weird thought: if I have an acre, and only planning on using 0.2 acre or less for planting. I won't mind converting the rest into woodland with fast growing or pesty trees. I can cut and trim the trees early to promote more growth and use the cut branches etc as source for more wood chips.

What kind of tree can satisfy that? I have privots in my yard that certainly grew like weed. How about bamboos? Aren't they almost like grass on steroid? If one has a 1/2 acre of mini bamboo forest, how much can one cut each year?

I called lots of tree companies but couldn't get any free wood chips this year, that stuff is in demand now. Would the pesty tree idea work?

Many bamboos send out runners and become difficult to contain. You're inviting an invasive to take over.

Careful of what you wish for.

to sense
..

This book could spark your imagination to do great things, Redesigning the American Lawn:
A Search for Environmental Harmony.

In my mind, a better use for your land would be giving landscaping and tree services free access to dump their trimmings on your property. You could have a never ending supply of compost for you and your neighbors.

Batya,
coppicing sounded like a great idea, I have never heard of it until your post. THANK YOU. Searching for fast growing tree for coppicing led me to Scouler Willow (Salix scouleriana), a native of western USA.

According to the above study by Innovative Tree Farming of Western Institute for Study of the Environment Colloquium:

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The best shrub for Pacific Northwest tree farmers to grow is Scouler willow. Taxonomists have identified over 50 species, subspecies, and varieties of willow in our region. Scouler willow is the most common, but many other native willows are excellent rod producers. Scouler willows can grow into small trees, but coppicing keeps them short and manageable.

Willows are easy to establish. Winter-cut branch tips or sucker shoots will take root if merely stuck in soil. Willows have an abundance of auxins, the plant hormones used in commercial rooting formulations. In fall, after the willows are well-established, growers cut them off a few inches above ground-level. In the following spring the root crown (coppice stool) will sprout new rods. Growers harvest the rods the in fall, and the cycle repeats.

Growers sell fresh willow rods to florists, or steamed, peeled, and dried rods to craft stores. Craft willow rods are sold by weight; current prices are over $5 per pound. An acre can produce 4 to 5 tons of willows rods every year, and willow farmers can produce annual crops worth over $40,000 per acre in gross sales. Market demand is high, and most of the willow rod supply currently sold in the U.S. is imported from Great Britain. Willow offers enormous profit-making opportunities to innovative tree farmers.

Willows also have catkins that are favored by florists.
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So the new shoots from the cippice stool can be harvested yearly. Not only to be chopped up for mulching but has commercial value too.

Does pine contain enough nematode killing fungus? I must say that I am learning so much on gardenweb.

You guys rocks.

We're directly across the street. Makes me kinda glad we're moving...I won't be there to see my yard and garden overtaken sometime in the near future! I hope it doesn't lower OUR sale price.

Bamboo can be pest, although they look great and grow fast. Not sure how effective the plastic bamboo barriers are in preventing the runners. I am glad to be talked out of considering bamboo too.

Mackel

Would trenching be as effective plastic barriers? If one digs a 2 ft deep and 2 ft wide trench around the bamboo, and does the annual cutting off of wandering rhizomes. Would that contain the expansion?

I have an excess of organic material each year due to the remarkable carbon seqestration of the plant. I give away the culms to artists and craftsmen, or pile it up in a woooded area to let it slowly rot when I clear out old, smaller diameter, or dead culms. About one fourth of the grove is removed each year. This makes it pleasant to walk through.

When bamboo flowers every twenty to one hundred and fifty years, instead of producing viable seed, it often dies out and if it doesn't, it is severely set back for several years. There is no case in one hundred and thirty years in this country, in fact, where it has spread by seed, and and that's over a hundred different species. It's been cultivated so long, it's lost it's ability to spread by seed, at least in the U.S., and it's easier to propagate it vegetatively, though one can order seed it's not legal to import seed so I don't, and it's tricky starting out with seed anyway.

Bamboo doesn't march on forever, unless it's in an artificial environment where trees are intentionally limited, and lawns are created, such as in the city. It outcompetes lawns, being that it's a grass that grows tall. There is a forty year old grove nearby that has spread one quarter of an acre, since it competes for sunlight, it's stopped it's "march", and has settled in and become a part of the "ecology". The rhizomes that peter out are tremendous soil builders, the microflora benefit from the high carbohydrate content, lots of sugars and starch. You can take a poor soil and make it great, simply by planting bamboo and wiping it out later as described earlier. Like no other plant including nitrogen fixing legumes.

It has no allelopathic properties, and trees and bamboo get along well and can mutually benefit each other. The tree supplies some shade, the bamboo supplies mulch for the tree. It is a symbiotic, rather than a parasitical, relationship. It's a forest plant for heavens's sake, it's in the plant's interests not to destroy it's natrual environment.