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Hi,

Anyone use a garden shredder? I'm looking for a solution to recycling my laurel hedge cuttings and have thought about using them for mulching but I am not sure whether these machines will get clogged up by "green" cuttings?

loopybretonbunny wrote:Anyone use a garden shredder? I'm looking for a solution to recycling my laurel hedge cuttings and have thought about using them for mulching but I am not sure whether these machines will get clogged up by "green" cuttings?

I have a Bosch shredder and I use it for exactly this purpose! I prune (and hack!) and then shred and then tip the shreddings on top of the soil as mulch. Seems to work well. Come mid summer when I realise I should have hacked a little more, I often end up cutting stuff back and shredding it full of sap. My shredder seems to cope just fine with green wood. Love it!

Alcina

Thanks Alcina

Can you tell me how powerful your shredder is?

Cheers

Hi LoopyBB (too much of a mouthful like my name, that's why they call me MMM ). Bienvenue!

We have one but it gets jammed up a lot with Leylandii clippings. It's our second one and the first one was worse! I think you need to spend quite a lot of money for a really good one which will cope. Mind you I think we spent several hundred quid. It's OK for stuff like Forsythia prunings though. I'll ask 'im outdoors what make & power it is if you like, just so you get an idea.

loopybretonbunny wrote:Can you tell me how powerful your shredder is?

Mine is the Bosch AXT 2000. It's very quiet. It has an automatic feed (it drags the branches down into itself, so there's no need for one of those paddle plunger things). It was about £200 and has a 2000 watt motor, so not very green in power consumption, but reduces the time for shredding all my annual cuttings from 2 days by hand to about an hour.

That said, I don't have any pine or fir trees - their sap is very sticky, so it's possible that I too would have trouble with Leylandii cuttings. But for everything else, it's fantastic! :)

Alcina

I wasted money two years ago on one of the bog standard electric ones with the horizontally rotating blade, can't remember the name. The main problem with it is it really doesn't "pull" the stuff in and jams frequently. I wish I had spent more and got one of the ones with the vertically-rotating blade that grabs and cuts like a cog... next time I have a lot of clearing to do I'm going to invest.