Do you want something that will throw chips through the air into a truck, or a smaller one that spits them out onto the ground?

Would you rent one, if one was available?

In our area, several rental locations - United Rental - rent quite powerful commercial size chippers for $100 to $175 per day.

The key with renting, is to have your route prepared, and to have all limbs stacked with cut or broken ends pointing in one direction to where the chipper chute will be.

Even a good small chipper can be $2000, so that price would provide many large properties with 5 to 10 years worth of renting.

Dotty, small chippers are junk. They work very slowly and are very noisy. They will drive you crazy. Just stack up your trimmings and bring them to the landfill, or hire a tree removal guy to chip them for you once a year. If you have a compact tractor like a Kubota or Jinma, you can get a chipper that is driven by the PTO. These work very well, but cost $1500 to $3000.

Renting is a good prospect but getting it here is a problem. We do have a Kubota Tractor with a PTO so I will investigate that. I agree about the small chipper -- we have a dinky one now and it's virtually useless. It's amazing the volume of chips you get from a few prunings. I have lots of use for them around the place. Thanks for the quick answers.

Just be aware that even the bigger ones on a PTO aren't blackberry friendly!!!

No blackberry prunings? Darn.

Why would you want to chip up that spawn of Satan anyway? Doesn't that just make 5 million potential little Beelzebubs? Or does the chipping shred them so fine they just go away?

One of the reasons I bought the chipper was that I was hoping I could just feed the blackberry canes into the chipper and have a pile of chips to use as a base for my compost hills.... but they just wrap around the chipper and needed a half hour to clean out. They can be chipped SLOWLY holding them back and not letting the chipper pull them in. But by that time, I can just cut them in four foot lengths(fits in the tractor front bucket) and have a whole clump cleared before I have a few handfuls of long canes shredded.

I've also found that as long as the ground underneath is relatively level, I can head the riding mulch mower straight into the patch and have it cleared in a few minutes. Mower set on highest setting, the subsequent regular low mowing will kill it.

But even with a small forest behind the house, buying the chipper wasn't really cost effective. I think it would be cheaper to rent after having gathered all the chippables to manageable piles.

... Don

I rented the model that home depot has for blackberries, ivy, laurel and small pine branches (1-2 inches) It was an incredible pain in the but, and I would not use it again for any of those. (It did all right on the fig branches, though) It may have been cheaper to drop it all at green cycle, then buy mulch on the way home.

hello dottyinduncan - I have an old and ancient chipper/shredder that "did" everything except long ivy vines - we used it constantly - I'll showe it to you the next time you visit. from beanthere

Liberty Chippers makes good PTO wood chipper. I use it on my John Deere with the PTO shaft, and the thing has been running for a couple years. I resharpen the blades about once every 6 months, and swap our the gear oil once in a while, but otherwise it hasn't required any maintenance

Here is a link that might be useful: Liberty Chippers

Mr. Meyers,

I have the Liberty 8 inch PTO chipper and it works fine. Can you tell me what angle you resharpen your blades at?

Thanks,

JB