Where chips come from

An earlier entry contains a few pictures showing how we are building our trails. I thought I'd show how those wood chips make their way to the property.

There are a few sites that have chips available, but the closest, cheapest (free) and easiest is the City of Bloomfield's sewage treatment plant property on the south west corner of Bloomfield, about 8 miles away. The guys there load the chips into our trailer for me. After it's loaded I pull half of the tarp over the top, strap it down and drive off.



When I get back to our place I back the trailer onto a simple ramp I built near the edge of the driveway where the soil was piled up higher than the original profile to support the leveling of the driveway's cross section. The steep drop off and the ramp bring the back of the trailer a few inches higher than the garden cart's sides.



With that altitude advantage I can push most of the chips into the cart with only minor shoveling. Then it's turn the cart south and hang on as gravity does its thing. Each trailer load fills the cart eight times.

Today it was hot and sunny so there were lots of breaks in the work, and, now that the paths near the barn have all the chips they need, all the trails left to cover are down hill, so each cart-load takes a bit longer than the last.

By the way, do you like the 50's fins on the trailer? They're leftover pieces from the siding at the peak of the barn. It looks a lot like my first car. It had a black roof and no reverse gear. I had to park it in diagonal spaces facing uphill only, but that's another story.