Brush chipping for the pile you already made

How a mound gets behind the garage in the first place

Almost nobody plans a brush pile. It happens in pieces. You take the low limbs off the maple in April so the mower fits underneath. In May you finally rip out the yew hedge your grandmother planted, roots and all. June you cut back the honeysuckle that had eaten six feet of fence, and by August there is a mound behind the garage that has its own weather. Every homeowner who calls us about it says a version of the same sentence: I thought it would settle.

It does settle, a little, and then it stops. Brush is mostly air, so a pile that looks like a small car is often only two or three loads once it goes through the machine. That gap between how it looks and what it actually is runs both directions, though. We have also pulled up to piles that photographed like nothing and turned out to have an entire dismantled deck railing buried in the middle. That is why we ask questions before we quote instead of after.

The other version of this call comes from three houses at once. Somebody on the street had a limb come down, a neighbor added their hedge trimmings, a third person contributed a Christmas tree from two years back, and now there is a collective pile at the end of a shared drive that nobody wants to claim. We chip those all the time. One visit, one machine, one number, and the neighbors can sort out the split among themselves.

Limbs to about twelve inches, fed butt-first, in that order

The chipper on our truck takes wood up to roughly twelve inches through. That covers essentially everything a homeowner generates with a chainsaw and a bad Saturday: limb wood, hedge material, saplings, storm-broken tops, whole scrub trees. Long pieces do not need cutting down to length first. In fact we would rather you left them long, because a twenty-foot limb fed butt-first pulls itself through and the small end vanishes as fast as the crew can walk it up. Short chunks are slower work than long ones, which surprises most people.

Butt-first matters more than length. Feeding the cut end in first means the rollers grab solid wood immediately and the branching stays behind, folding in on itself as it goes. Feed the same limb the other way around and the crew is wrestling a bushy tangle into a hole that is trying to spit it back out. Pittsburgh sees a lot of piles built by well-meaning people who stacked everything tips-out toward the driveway, which looks tidier and takes noticeably longer to run.

What jams a chipper is almost never the wood

A twelve-inch oak limb is easy. What stops the machine is the stuff that came with it. Vines are the biggest one around here, because a rope of grapevine or bittersweet will not break, it will wrap the rollers and bind them up like fishing line on a reel, and clearing that is somebody lying under the feed table with a knife for twenty minutes. Root balls are the second, and they are worse than they look. Dirt and gravel packed in the roots of a yanked-out shrub hit the knives at speed and dull a whole set in one pull, which is why we shake them out or set them aside for hauling instead of chipping.

Then there is the mystery hardware. Old piles collect things. Fence wire that was strung through a hedge before anybody remembers, a T-post the vines pulled over, tomato cages, a length of chain-link, the metal bracket off a swing set, half a bag of concrete mix. Steel in the feed is how knives break, and a broken knife is a bad day for everybody standing near the machine. So when Chris walks the pile he is not admiring your brush. He is asking what came out of the ground with it, whether there was ever a fence on that line, and how old the bottom of the pile is. Answer honestly, including the part you forgot about, and the visit goes smoothly.