THE COMPOSTER'S CUISINART

Enlarge Image Image Gallery (LEFT TO RIGHT) KEMP SAMPSON, KINSMAN , KEMP MASTER GARDENER (PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTHA STANITZ)

A good shredder/chipper can turn scrap brush and garden waste into great compost or mulch.

An ominous crack! during a gusty thunderstorm last week warned me that I'd have some work to do when the rain stopped. Sure enough, when the skies cleared, I saw that one-third of a 60-year-old Baldwin apple tree had toppled and now lay blocking the driveway. A couple of hours with a chain saw restored access, but then the rest of the cleanup loomed. I'd forgotten just how many branches an apple tree has!

In just a few hours more, though, all that trash wood was neatly lining a path in my garden, shredded and chipped into a fragrant wood mulch. The hero was a shredder/chipper/grinder, a multipurpose garden tool that turns outdoor calamities into horticultural silk purses.

Garden shredder/chippers are very versatile implements. I've used ours to shred leaves and green garden scraps for quick compost as well as to reduce our autumn leaves to a compact, finely ground material that rapidly mellows to superb leaf mold. And there's no better way of getting rid of cornstalks and other tough harvest wastes than by grinding them into a well-shredded mulch. (I've learned from bitter experience, though, that some materials just aren't appropriate for shredding. Bittersweet, for one; ivy, for another. I spent a whole summer rooting out a new patch of bittersweet before I learned not to shred that invasive grower.)

Commercial shredder/chippers fall into two basic categories: electric-powered and gasoline-powered. Basically, the electric units are ideal for smaller properties. They're light, quiet, and capable of chopping up most garden or yard trash. They do require a heavy-duty extension cord — no less than 14-gauge wire, and 12-gauge is better — and a circuit with a slow-blow fuse, since at start-up they can momentarily draw as much as 40 amps. Some electric shredder/chippers are less prone to blowing fuses than others. (The Kemp Samson model does particularly well in this regard.)