A photo...

Excelsior packing material, aka Wood Wool, has ben around for as long as
I can remember to aid in preventing damage to package objects, much longer than bubble wrap. I have seen it woven into mats for erosion control as well and being a natural product, wood shavings (although I am aware there are now synthetic versions of it) it can be used as mulch on gardens just as well as straw.

kimmq is kimmsr

OK, I have now extracted the birdbath, and I'm not so sure I want to use this excelsior, even in my no-edibles garden. There is a kind of chemical smell to the excelsior - maybe ammonia-ish? - definitely not a friendly, woody smell at all. It might have been treated with something. Which would be a real shame, I hate for it to go to waste.

Whenever, I've received any I've just stuck it on the compost heap. Excelsior is a wonderful name. It's just plain old wood wool over here.

Pallets for international trade are normally treated to prevent the spread of plant diseases and insects, but most of that is steam treatment these days. Possible they used a fumigant gas, if so it should dissipate if left out the air. Are you sure it's not just the odor of the wood itself?

If you come around to using it, you could always use a thin layer and cover with another mulch you like the looks of.

I am glad to have confirmation that it actually is called "wood wool" somewhere in the world, because I was beginning to think that Wikipedia made that up. I think I'm going to start greeting people with "Excelsior!" from now on.

*Definitely* not a wood smell. An unpleasant chemical smell. But I have the stuff outgassing on the patio now, so there's room to hope that the smell may dissipate. Then I can worry about the problem of noodle-garden aesthetics.

Since Excelsior, or Wood Wool, is a natural product, wood shavings, the shipper may be concerned about it becoming infested with insects and probably treated the stuff with some insecticide to prevent that, especially if the shipper was overseas.

Fluff the stuff up and allow it to air out for a while to dissipate whatever might be in that wood wool.

kimmq is kimmsr

I know you are all dying to know the status of my Excelsior! I am able to inform you that the airing out process seems to be getting rid of the smell, so far. It doesn't exactly smell like wood, either - whatever wood it is made of, it's very white and not very aromatic. I never did dig all the stuff out of the box, though, because it is jammed in there so tightly and it is so rigid (the ramen comparison is apter than you know) that it will never go back in, once pulled out. And my patio is small.

The stray bits of Excelsior! that are lying around the garden patch look like demented escaping spaghetti. The material is such a bright white color that it doesn't exactly harmonize with my existing shredded bark mulch. I have lots of birds around, but they must be done with nest-building by now as I haven't seen them making off with the Excelsior!

If I felt like sitting around with a big pair of scissors, I could probably cut down the long white strands into shorter pieces, which could be more easily mixed with or layered under other mulching materials. My finger joints don't much like the idea, though. As it is, it would take a lot of pulling across a pretty big surface to get it to spread out from its box-shaped mass.

I thought I'd give a final update on my Excelsior!, which is turns out is a lot more fun to say than to deal with.

It doesn't make good mulch, even if you cut it up into shorter lengths. I cut some of it up, as an experiment, and it was just about as tedious and tiring as you'd expect, even with my large good-quality garden shears. The quantity that I did manage to cut up, I spread around my little patio garden, where it looked just like springy bunches of curly noodles, or maybe really huge steel wool.

The Excelsior! doesn't lie down or mat together - it just keeps springing and coiling like curly hair on a rainy day. (I have first hand experience with THAT natural process.) I tried tucking the stuff under a good layer of my normal shredded bark mulch, but over time, with wind and rain and gardening activities, it tends to escape and spring out again, and migrate around the garden.

So, in brief, it doesn't provide good soil coverage, it doesn't stay where you put it, and it looks weird. Not good performance for a mulch material. I think if you could cut it into REALLY short lengths, it might work a bit better as mulch, but I don't know what kind of commonly available home garden equipment would do that effectively. I also think it's likely to be very flammable, which may also be a safety concern in the garden.

As for composting: I don't have space for an outdoor compost pile, but even if I did, I think I'd need a much larger than average size pile as well as plenty of other materials to mix with the Excelsior!, to weigh it down, provide nitrogen, and keep it moist enough to eventually decompose. Also, in any actively managed compost pile, I can easily imagine that the springy tangles would seriously impede turning the pile. Again, you could cut it up, but the problem of how to do it remains.

If you had a good-sized "out back" area where you could just pile it up with heaps of leaves or something on top and forget about it for a good long while, I believe you could eventually get it cold-composted down. Likely it would take years.

I also am still not sure whether there was any lingering issue with chemical treatment to the Excelsior! After airing out, it lost its unpleasant chemical smell and wound up with no smell at all, but even so, I'd be a little hesitant to use it en masse on edible crops without knowing more. Perhaps a lengthy composting process, or just leaving it out to weather, would be enough to dissipate any problem.

(The above comments apply to a LARGE amount of excelsior such as I had, which was easily about 2 cubic feet or more; if you get a little bit in a gift basket or something, obviously it would be easier to add to a compost pile, quicker to break down, and likely not a large enough quantity to worry about possible chemical treatments.)

It was probably bleached and treated with chemicals in order to slow down the decomposition (composting) of the wood. I would be careful to what ever you decide to do with it.

Craigslist it as a freebie for composting OR crafts. Dyed, they could make fake bird nests out of it.

It's already been curb alerted. Don't know who took it or what they wanted it for.

Realistically, though I express caution on general principle, I don't actually think any extensive treatments would have been used on the Excelsior! that I got, because it wouldn't be economical to bleach or otherwise intensively treat a bunch of packing material used to ship a birdbath. Why would you bother? Probably a quick fumigation of some sort accounted for the smell.

The little research I did seemed to indicate that Excelsior! is normally made of aspen, which is quick growing, cheap, naturally light colored (you can see in the shredded material that there is some slightly darker colored heartwood present) and lacking much smell of its own.

They use that aspen stuff in evaporative (swamp) coolers in the American Southwest, as pads to disperse the water as the air goes through. Not treated at all. If it's from overseas, it *may* be heat treated like pallets usually are, to kill pests and diseases, but most of that is not chemical treatment anymore. What is, is fumigation, so once the gas leaves it's gone. Aspen does have a distinctive odor when fresh, from experience changing a lot of swamp cooler pads.