Wood Shavings! Are They A Valuable Resource For Your Homestead? What Do You Use Them For?
Wood shavings or wood are a necessity on the homestead. You use them from anything to litter for your chicks, on the floor of your barn in the stalls. You use them to help enrich the soil of your garden and to help conserve moisture, stop weeds and grass from growing in your garden, keep the plant roots cool when they are spreading out through the soil. Many homesteaders even use wood shaving in their houses, for a composting toilet. Which keeps the toilet from smelling and absorbs the moisture. There are many uses for wood shaving and wood chips.
Many people go to the big box stores to buy these and spend a small fortune on these wood chips and shavings. did you ever stop to think of looking around your area for a woodworking shop that has an excess of wood shaving from the work they do? Their planers and routers make lots of wood shavings in a day. You can also contact tree companies and see if they need a place to dump chips. Let them dump them on your property and that is free chips for you to use.
We got on Craigslist and found one of these woodworking shops. We get all the wood shavings and chips they have for $10.00 and it is not just a little bit of shaving from their planer and router. Here is the pile after we left for the day because our minivan was full.
We left them because they were wet from the snow and the rain we got a few days ago. They had started to mold and we did not want it in the van, so we will have to try and borrow a truck to go get the rest of them. You can see from the mark on the wall where they were when we got there. These is cypress shaving as this is all the company uses because they make things for outdoor use like tables for the Big Green Egg smokers and outdoor kitchen tables and shelves, really whatever you need.
We got all we could in our minivan and it was quite a bit. We used the black bags for the 55-gallon drums. We had two 35 gallon barrels we packed as much as we could into. This is the van and we still got the other 35-gallon barrel in the back along with two more bags. If we would have taken the seats out we could have got more in the minivan.
What would you have paid for this many shaving at the big box stores? Here I guess it would have been about $100.00. Yes, we had to do a little work like use a shovel, that they provide for you to use, to fill the bags and barrels or shovel it in the back of a truck. We got it all for $10.00 and it is not pine shavings it is cypress shavings. Insects do not like cypress shaving so in the garden it would be an insect repellent. So look up the woodworking shops in your area in the yellow pages and call them and ask what they do with their wood shavings or check out Craigslist. I did not get a picture of the pile before we started because my phone takes some bad pictures, lucky for me one of the guys used his phone to get these shots for me and sent them to my phone via Bluetooth.
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You can also sign up to potentially get wood shaving delivered to your house through chipdrop. We haven't gotten any deliveries yet but I think that's because we are far from town. It's worth a shot!
Yes, you can do that and if they are working close to your house they might stop in and dump where you told them too. I am out in the woods too so not much here, like you signed up just never dumped any here yet.
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Excellent! We have had access to a wood working shop like that up north, but they did a lot of compressed wood work. I didn't like the glue additives and such. It would be nice to find a straight up Cypress wood or cedar or such.
The glue and such is a bad thing. I love the cypress wood and the fact that it is insect repellent is nice. If cedar is used in certain animal cages it may burn there feet I think so be careful about where you use cedar. I know when we raised rats and such we found this out the hard way.
That's a great idea. I'm going to look into shops in my area. We're looking into buying a chipper right now.
I have been thinking about getting a chipper but other things have priority right now. It will come later I am sure. You can also talk to tree companies as they need places to dump chips from time to time.
Well, we've got a big old tree coming down in our backyard today, and we found a wood chipper with great reviews that would cost less than it would cost to have the tree hauled off somewhere. We've offered it to the people we know with fireplaces and wood stoves, but none of them want to pick it up. So we're going to chip everything under 3 inches in diameter and the larger stuff will be fire pit fodder. ☺
That is great use the chips around your garden or flower beds. I believe the ashes are even a good resource for your gardens too. Use in place of lime in your garden and in the compost pile. Not too much at a time though. Too much of a good thing is bad. Ha Ha
My grandmother called the wood ash that she put in her garden potash. Anytime there was a wood fire she would collect up the ashes. I believe she normally mixed them into her compost.
I think mine also made lye soap from them too.
I don't think my grandmother ever paid attention to the way her granny made lye soap from wood ashes but it is definitely something I'm interested in learning to do. I make our own soap but it's from store-bought lie. I know it sounds like I'm going off the deep end but anything that we can do for ourselves that we don't have to purchase in a store is kind of my goal. And lye soap from wood ashes would prevent us from having to purchase the bottled lye.
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These are really nice since they are ground up for you already. I was able to get several loads of wood chips from a tree clearing crew that were working nearby. I just asked the foreman if he would mind dumping at my house and they even came and delivered for free!