My Search for Arborist Wood Chips, Whatever they Are

Arborist wood chips are in the gardening ether these days, with Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott herself (of Garden Professor and myth-busting fame) leading the charge to promote them above all over types of mulch. (Details in this brochure.) Just recently she’s debunked myths about them on a Joe Gardener podcast.

There’s been much discussion of arborist wood chips on the Garden Professors Facebook group over its lifetime, with more converts singing its praises. One member of the group is the terrific gardening YouTuber Patrick Dolan, whose channel One Yard Revolution: Frugal & Sustainable Organic Gardening has over 116,000 subscribers, which is a lot for gardening.

Dolan recently posted this video citing the many virtues of the stuff, and crediting Chalker-Scott as his source. They’re summarized in the description below the video:

7 reasons why arborist wood chips are the best wood chip mulch for your vegetable garden: they support a broad diversity of soil life and promote healthier plants; their diversity in materials and particle sizes results in less compaction compared to uniform mulches; they are large enough to remain on the soil surface; they don’t tie up nitrogen in the root zone; they break down slowly; they are local and sustainable; they are the least expensive option.

And here’s some great news – he found a website for locating arborist wood chips either free or cheap! It’s GetChipDrop.com 

Perusing the comments on the video, I found plenty of advocates, including one who wrote, “Wood chips changed my life.”

One commenter suggests yet another benefit – that wood chips they absorb water, while bark mulch repels water.

Asked where Dolan uses arborist wood chips in his vegetable garden, we learn that he mulches “pathways, perennials, and large annuals with wood chips. We don’t use them on beds of intensively planted closely spaced annuals.”

One commenter asked if the guitar introduction on the One Yard Revolution channel is by Dolan himself. Yep, that him.

For this viewer, it took seeing arborist wood chips in the video to understand what the hell they are – bits of leaves, branches, twigs, bark and trunk from a variety of tree species, in a variety of sizes.

And it turns out that I may have been getting arborist wood chips in my latest mulch run to my city’s tree-and yard-waste dump site. Here’s a shot of my latest haul, looking pretty close to the ideal. Most times of the year, however, the pile this came from is just leafmold mulch – chopped-up and partially decomposed leaves – or even worse, leaves that are fully decomposed into compost.

For a somewhat dressier look, I’ve been pitch-forking carloads from a pile of wood chips provided by my housing co-op. I’m afraid they don’t qualify as arborist-type, though – too uniform, and I see no signs of bark or leaves among the chips.

So how can local governments (or co-ops) recycling tree and yard waste create the super-special mix we’re coming to know as arborist wood chips? Anyone know? (I’ll also ask the plant geeks in the Garden Professors group.)