My city is going to widen the streets in my neighborhood (yeah!) and they contracted with a tree company to take down each and every tree that was planted between the street and the sidewalk. The majority being mature Live Oaks. The tree company came in yesterday and ground all of the stumps, but instead of leaving piles of nice richly-textured mulch, they left heaping piles of sawdust. I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and don't particularly care that the mulch in my flowerbeds be uniform, but before I haul wheelbarrows full of this sawdust and dump them into my flowerbeds, I thought I'd better ask --- will sawdust cause any harm? I'm sure it will degrade much faster than mulch, but that's okay. As long as its safe and environmentally friendly.
If anyone out there is interested in free sawdust/mulch, send me a Dmail.
Carla
Sawdust as mulch?
That's nice fresh non-treated sawdust - should be great - but being oak it will take a little longer to break down.
It would need to degrade some before your able to use it in your flower beds. Why not compostit for a while and let it detoriate somewhat before using it.
I have heard that sawdust will rob the soil of nitrogen in the process of decomposition, but if you add a little nitrogen to the soil surface, such as manure or cotton seed meal before applying it, that will make up for the deficit.
Or you could do as Dean said and compost it first.
Josephine.
Thanks, y'all. I do have a place where it can sit and compost for awhile, so looks like I will indeed be making good use of it.
Carla
Great, it would be a shame to waste it.
I'd get some from you but, Rowlett is probally too far of a drive.
Enjoy,
Dean_W
It would be best to put the sawdust in your compost bins. While I have never used raw sawdust as mulch, I have dumped the sawdust from the radial saw into piles on the ground. Mold or fungus seem to grow easily in the sawdust producing a tangled mass of filaments that make the sawdust clump and repel water.
Josephine, you are correct. raw, none composted wood will leach or better said suck the nitrogen out of the soil so it can break down. It would be best to throw it in the compost bin and then keep tossing in fresh cut grass and turn over, mix, when you add the grass. It takes a long time for the chips to break down.
We have a wood shop and we have "dust fairies" that come and pick up our sawdust. I don't know exactly what these people do with all that dust, but I'm sure glad they want it, because we would have to burn it if they didn't. She told us once that they grow orchids. They must have a pretty big operation because we aren't the only people they collect from. Or maybe they compost it to make some kind of growing medium for orchids and then sell it.
Now you've made me curious about what they do with it. Even composted, it would be too fine for many of the most popular orchids unless they use it on terrestrial orchids. My orchids are in an orchid mix made up of several types of coarse chips since it is used mainly to keep the plant from taking a nose dive out of the pot.
Yea, I had an orchid once, but it died so I haven't tried again. But I've seen the mediums it grows in. We aren't always there when they come to get it, but the next time I see them, I'll ask what they do with it.