Lucy asks if the shredder-chipper is worth the money and
should be purchased or if it might be better to rent.
A tough call! We bought an 8 horse power MTD shredder-
chipper for about $500 and it worked fine. It takes a
high powered unit to take care of stout branches and
while it was noisy and kicked up a lot of dirt, it did
the job. It was also an un-sightly monster that was
often hard to start.
We found that we needed about 8 to 10 cubic yards of
compost per year to maintain our garden and it was just
too labor intensive to try to make that much. We sold our
unit for $100 and went to commercial compost. (Maybe
a used unit might be found)
Our community has garden clippings pick-up which is
then composted and sold to the public. We could, therefore,
ease our ecological conscience about giving up our compost
pile. So... my suggestion is to rent a shredder-chipper
and see if you can live without a noisy, dirt producing,
difficult to start, un-sightly, over-priced monster and
to decide from there.