For a long time, i’ve been trying to build large amount of compost, but a lot of the green matter available is just too tough, so i’ve spent a lot of hours chopping it by hand into little pieces, with a clipper, by hand. Family and neighbors have stopped and stared, astonished at the manual labor, poking fun at me.
When i heard there was such a thing as a chipper/shredder, a search began. It’s a class of machines, gas or electric, not as big as a wood chipper, made for shredding brush and small branches. I looked online (nobody would ship to Hawai’i), i called stores, i called rental companies. No luck. Finally, a week ago i was whining about it at a potluck, and a nice older couple said, “Hey, we’ve got one of those, haven’t used it in years, would you like it?”
Would i! Paid $200, got it home, figured out how to take it apart and sharpen the blades. Started it up and… it’s incredible. Branches, long stringy grass, wet green ginger stalks, you name it, it shreds into a slurry which is perfect for going right into the compost pile.
Yesterday, i saw our neighbors driving a truck of plant debris across their land to dump it. I hollered over the fence, and soon found myself in possession of a whole big truckload of hapu’u branches and ginger stalks. Into the chipper it went, and made a whole huge pile of beautiful green matter. Although there is a little bit of wood chip and dry matter in the mix, there is still plenty of green for effective composting (Nitrogen / Carbon ratio).
Yes, i look like a dweeb in safety glasses, but Deb made me promise to wear them.
Now, there is an issue to wrestle with. We’re aspiring to permacultural ideals; reducing petroleum usage for farm inputs is definitely important. On the other hand, rapidly producing a large amount of compost is critically important to farming organic, biodynamic, biointensive, whatever you want to call it. If i use some amount of gas to do it – versus spending countless hours on manual labor – it is a net plus or minus? How different is it from using a lawn mower then gathering the clippings for compost? Should i have insisted on an electric-powered shredder – as our electricity on this island is 20-30% renewable geothermal? Is the only “true” sustainable thing toiling all day in an agrarian society? Am i selling out, or is everyone selling out by using metal tools, which were produced most certainly with huge amounts of coal? How much fertility would have been produced by turning that petroleum into chemical fertilizer, versus the compost from using it to run my shredder instead? Complex.
