Recycle Wood From Your Garden
When clearing out parts of your garden in order to free space for new or different projects, you come across a lot of wood. You don’t need to throw it in the bin. There are a lot of other options of how to use it.
If you have an existing green area in your garden, field or yard, which needs to be cleared out for let’s say the erection of a shed, or for a new planting area, you’ll have to cut down a lot of wood from shrubs and trees. The amounts accumulating from this sort of work are often underestimated. Once ended up with a huge heap of wooden bits of different sizes in the garden or yard, most people automatically grab their phone and ring the local waste and recycling company for a skip.
Image via Wikipedia
But not only is this expensive, while most of the skip contents would end up on general dump sites anyway, but a lot of this wood you could reuse in or around your own home. Here are some ideas of what you could do.
1) If you are still allowed to have an open fire (in some city areas prohibited already), you could simply use some of the bigger pieces for fire wood. Separate leaves, twigs and small branches from the bigger branches of 2 inch or more in diameter, and cut them into manageable pieces of fire wood, maybe 5 x 2 inches. Then dry them properly, and days to weeks later, you’ll have some nice fire wood for a cozy warm fire.
Image via Wikipedia
2) If you have a number of more or less straight trunks and branches, you can use the branches directly for some wooden home construction projects, like fence posts, shed studs or supports. If required, chip the bark off, and saw and plane into boards.
Image via Wikipedia
3) Bark chips obtained from cleaning up the branches and trunks can directly be used as bark mulching for your plants and beds.
Image via Wikipedia
4) Smaller branches, twigs and leaves can be put through the garden shredder, and can either be used for mulching, or be a valuable enrichment of brown waste in your very own compost heap.
Image via The Chain Gang Cycle Tours.
5) Art projects can make us of any interestingly shaped and weird looking pieces. Only your imagination is the limit here. The photo below shows for instance a few nice pieces of furniture created from natural wood.
Image via Top Best Design.
6) An insect sanctuary can simply be built by stacking different sizes of wood – cut to a certain length – by packing them tightly or drilling holes in them. These are places where insects overwinter, and can later be of benefit for your garden plants in the next growing season. You’ll find a lot of instructions for this sort of project on the Internet.
Image via Bugs Of The World.
This way, nothing or not much goes to waste, and this valuable natural resource will be put to different forms of use around your house and garden.
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Published in: Gardening
Kate Smedley | Jan 19, 2011 | Reply
I know a friend who would find this article very interesting – very useful advice and helpful photos too.
OhSugar | Jan 19, 2011 | Reply
This can only be called using common sense from good advice. The photos tell the story well.
Julie McMurchie | Jan 26, 2011 | Reply
Great advice for recycling wood back into the garden. Ash from those wood fires is also a good soil amendment.