Is A Wood Chipper A Good Investment?

Timothy Devries
3 min readMar 22, 2018

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Mulch from wood, fallen leaf, and other similar items can be of great use in your garden. Mulching has a multitude of benefits for your garden and backyard. It can help retain moisture and prevent erosion. Mulch can help your yard during both summers and winters. Now, there are two ways you can procure mulch — you can either buy it from a store or you can convert the fallen or trimmed branches and leaves from your yard into mulch using a wood chipper.

A wood chipper will reduce the trash from trimming and cleaning your yard by converting them into much smaller chips or pieces. In many places, you cannot burn the branches and leaves from your yard and you cannot ask the garbage men to pick it up either. A wood chipper is a good tool to help you in such situations. There are many different wood chippers available in the market and you can buy one that best meets your needs. But before you decide on what type of wood chipper to buy, the first question is whether a wood chipper is a good investment or not. The answer depends on a variety of factors.

You may wonder why you need a chipper at all. Can’t this be done by hand? Yes, of course, it can be. But it is very labor intensive and time-consuming and if you have a lot of land, it would be quite impossible to get through all the branches and leaves on your own. Now, you have to decide between getting store-bought mulch and getting a wood chipper. A good wood chipper will cost around $100 to $200 whereas you can get a bag of mulch will only cost a few dollars. At first look it may seem like buying a wood chipper is a waste of money. But it the long run a wood chipper can be a really good investment as it shoots two birds with one bullet. It gets rid of the garbage from your yard and also gives you mulch you can use for your garden.

Depending on the area you have and the kind of trees on your land, you can either get an electric wood chipper or a gas powered one. The electric wood chipper is best suited for loose debris and smaller branches. The gas powered wood chipper can turn bigger branches also into mulch. So if you have large trees on your property, then the gas-powered wood chipper will be a great investment. If your property has small bushes and only a few small trees, then you can get the electric wood chipper.

If you have a small yard and not much debris to clean up and all you need is some mulch to use in your garden, then it would be better to just buy bags of mulch from the store instead of spending money on a wood chipper that will take up space and won’t be of much use to you. But if you have a big yard and you do have considerable debris to clean up every day, then a wood chipper is a great investment and you should definitely purchase one.

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