January 13, 2014

What You May Not Know About Grinding Up Trees

On Friday's blog, I showed you how my farm crew was spreading compost over the garden beds.  As you may know, we make all that compost in an area of the farm called the compost yard.  Throughout the year, the crew amasses quite a large pile of organic debris from the farm including stumps, logs, and brush.  This year, and sadly so, that pile was enormous because it contained more than 150 stately trees that came down in last year's Hurricane Sandy.  All of this material will eventually decay but, in years past, we've brought in an industrial machine called a tub grinder to grind it all up and accelerate the decomposition of this organic matter.  The tub grinder does a fine job, but grinding so many large trees would take a very long time.  After some research, we decided to have the massive pile of wood first pass through a different machine called a horizontal wood grinder.  Yes, I'm sad about losing so many trees, but I'm glad that they are now decomposing into compost for future use around the farm.

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