Can I use them to build lasagna bed? The chipped branches are brown? and the leafs are green? Proportion of brown to green are obviously uncertain and they are mixed together unevenly. In my area, the tree can be eucalyptus, pine or even redwood. Eucalyptus can excrete poisons that can be toxic to other plants, don't they?

If these mix-chips can be used to build lasagna bed, I am thinking of (from bottom) Newspaper - Steer manure - mix-chips - steer manure - mix-chips - steer manure - straw. About 24" tall.

This will be for gardening and not vegetable, will it work?

Thanks for helping.

The chipped branches are brown? and the leafs are green? Nope ... thin branches and twigs have a lot of moisture and nitrogen in their bark and cambium.

I consider chipper/shredder stuff (unless I am shredding deadwood) to be an ideal ingredient for composting just as it is - it heats up fast, sitting in the pile of shreddings, and quickly degrades to a coarse granular compost that makes a good topping for veggie beds.

Proportion of brown to green are obviously uncertain and they are mixed together unevenly. True, but if you shovel them in and shovel them out and rake them onto the bed they will mix pretty well. Don't worry about it. It averages out.

Eucalyptus can excrete poisons that can be toxic to other plants, don't they? Not that I have read in any reputable source.

Newspaper - Steer manure - mix-chips - steer manure - mix-chips - steer manure - straw. About 24" tall. If you are using fresh cow manure, good. Dried commercial "steer manure" ... not so good. It's over-rated and often high in salt content (as well as stinky).

A couple layers of high-clay dirt would improve the mix and improve the water retention.

Paper>steer manure>chips>steer manure>dirt>straw>chips>steer manure>straw

I need something to hold them down though as winter can be windy here.

From my own experience in the mid Atlantic, I made one bed with very fine chips mixed with grass clippings, compost and soil. That bed, a year later, is just beginning to produce, and not nearly as vigorously as the beds with no wood chips, made at the same time. Even peas and beans did not grow well in that bed.

hepatica
hepatica

Re: how quickly the freshly cut tree chips break down .. in my experience, the smaller the chips, the more quickly they morph into compost. The chips used in my pathways [which might be similar to a lasagna type situation?] break down VERY quickly ... except for the larger [4-6"] seem to last quite a while. The next quickest composting situation is material used as a mulch in my well-watered garden, and the slowest decomposition is in a part of my yard that only gets watered by rain ... they perform the task of supressing weeds. As to how quickly they compost within my compost pile .. I don't know how quickly, because I don't turn and only harvest once a year. It's all composted down by then, except for the occasional larger piece.

As one poster said, our climate may have a bearing on my experience with fresh wood chips. I think the operative word is FRESH.

But I think that tree services have the entire tree in the truck, including the wood from the trunk. I would not till that sort of mulch into the soil nor layer it into a lasagna bed. I would either compost it or use is as a mulch on top of soil.

I have a nice chipper and in my situation I would re-chip the wood chips to a smaller chip size and then use it.

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Simply piled alone they store well, and in five years will look almost the same as they day they were piled. Summer chips (with green leaves) will heat up and rot down a bit, but there is so much more carbon in the chips than nitrogen in their leaves, that the brief period of initial heating soon subsides. Of course this depends somewhat on the type of woods being chipped, but getting more chips than you can use in a year or two is no real problem if you have a place to store them. Piles of chips are very porous, so they naturally tend to dry out quickly on their own unless covered with a tarp, straw or hay, etc. Since drying is preserving, simple piles of chips don't compost, they keep.
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So using them along, they don't decompose much. Then if you add manure or more green matter, they compose very hot. Is that desirable in a lasagna bed?

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All of the work done on building soils with ramial chipped wood recommends tilling the chips directly into the soil. I have done this sometimes, usually followed by a cover crop. When tilling in two inches of popple chips, I have found that there are temporary (one year) signs of nitrogen deficiency (poor crop growth, small plants with yellowing of leaves). By the second year these signs disappear. This may have been due to the large amount used, and the fact that some of the branches chipped were rather large. In future, I will be doing more direct tilling of chips into the soil using popple, alder and other mixed woods in separate sections, and chipping smaller diameter wood. The research quoted above has shown that ramial chips from climax trees (oak, maple, yellow birch, beech) produce the best quality soils, while ramial chips from conifers are the least beneficial.

Mixed with cow manure, chips take more than a year to digest, so we no longer use them this way. However, over the past two years we have discovered that grass clippings have the necessary nitrogen to make chips "disappear" within a year when mixed at the rate of one grass to two chips and turned a few times. Such piles get VERY HOT very quickly. This past summer's pile is six feet high and thirty feet long and could be seen emiting warm vapor in the cool of morning and evening.
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I am back to square one :)

Deanna

yet, websites for lasagna gardening state that you can plant into a layered bed immediately. I assume it's because it doesn't reach the mass (height) to "cook", it is more like "cold composting".

basically, i think the OP is safe to plant whenever they are ready.

I've read the same claim, but personal experience contradicts it. I've got a much smaller bin and have had it get to 180F when I've managed it carefully.

I took down a poplar tree a few years back, in spring. We cut all the wood down to about 1" dia. for firewood, so only the smaller stuff and leaves went into the chipper. That stuff did heat up and decompose pretty fast. But I agree the tree service truck is going to have much bigger stuff in it. More's the pity.

Is the lasagna bed method so that you get plants in faster? Just get a load of topsoil and fill the beds with that, then when your big pile of compost is ready, amend the topsoil beds with that.

Around here a load of topsoil is relatively cheap. I got three yards this spring for $105. It's good but not great, I mean I grew most of my veggies this year in that dirt alone and had pretty good crops. I can't wait to amend it with my compost that i'm doing this year as the soil is a little tight and doesn't drain well.

Next year besides building 6-8 more raised beds, I plan on screening all my topsoil (including the pile I dug out for my sunken patio area) and then screen and mix my compost with that to amend it and then put it into my beds. I am hoping I have enough compost to really get a good OM mix into the dirt, but I have 4 large maples (60ft trees) which will be giving me quite a supply of leaves to add into the mix this fall.

If you have the space, I think you could make a better soil faster by making a big compost pile and really cooking those woodchips down fast. A big enough pile with enough green will nuke those things down in record time. It sounds like putting them uncomposted into a growing medium might not be quite as beneficial in the short term.

the lasagna garden can either be used immediately or prepared in fall and used in spring. but this is where it gets hazy... the exact ingredients/layers to use (ratio of c:n) on every web page I read differs... even here on gardenweb.