The Chipper

I love trees. And I also love wood-chips. Is there a contradiction here, maybe? Wood chips are excellent soil improvement agents, and can be used to cover soil and strengthen soil life. Especially chips made from "ramial wood" is supposed to be excellent. At least according to the holistic apple grower Michael Phillips. Ramial wood is a fancy name for thin branches, up to finger-size thickness.

I have quite some branches laying around to chop here, and a few trees that I want to prune. I have patiently been waiting for the leaves to drop and next week I think I will saw off the lowest branches from these beech trees:

And I want to run them in a sturdy chipper. After a three month wait, finally the powerchipper arrived. It is an implement to the BCS/Ferrari tractor, so that I can utilize the Honda motor to drive the chipper. It is an impressive 100kg orange-painted steel contraption that took me some time to assemble.

How to you get a 100kg box into your shed? That was the first question I had, when it arrived.

Then the assembly game could start:

I did a bit of a test drive just to see that everything was moving fine. I still do hesitate on the right tension in the belt drive. How taut does the V-belt have to be?

Later this week, I will test drive the chipper and see how it performs, especially in comparison with the 220V electric chipper that I have used until now. It is supposed to be 8 hp instead of 2 hp, but the design is quite different and the rotating mass is probably 10x in this machine.

I also got a box with vertical plow, and that one will be tested next week.

On a completely different note, this week we are also collecting the last usable apples from the abandoned gardens in the municipality. Next year we will call together an action group to rescue more apples and other fruit. It is amazing how much is left to rot.

These apples, we turned into dried apple-chips. A sweeter kind if chips than the wood chips of the chipper.

I also did a day trip to Copenhagen to visit a colleague. I brought my small foldable bike on the train and it was great to see how good the biking infrastructure is in Denmark.

Even the S-trains (suburban commuter trains) have great racks for bikes. I took the S-train to the Glostrup station and biked to Brondby. Even on a drizzling day, Copenhagen is a heaven for us bikers.