10 Reasons To Buy A Garden Shredder

If you have trees, bushes and shrubs in your garden, you’ll know all about having to prune them to stop them taking over the garden. Some fast growing trees and shrubs can need pruning up to 3 times per season, leaving you with quite a few branches and twigs to deal with. There are a few ways you can get rid of the wood, you can burn it, take it to the council tip, or if you’re really patient, you could cut each branch up into tiny pieces and add them to the compost.

Alternatively you could buy a garden shredder to save time and energy to dispose of your prunings. The chippings from a shredder are usually the perfect size to go into the compost pile. Plus they also make a great mulch to help suppress weeds and prevent water evaporation.

Why Buy A Garden Shredder?

Buying a garden shredder is quite an investment, with a starting price of somewhere around £100, a garden shredder isn’t something to rush into buying. Let’s have a look at why we think buying a garden shredder is well worth the investment.

1. Saves On Trips To The Tip

If like us, you have just one car, it has to be used for everything. From school runs, shopping trips, weekends away, and running branches to the tip. This makes the car interior dirty, so as well as wasting a bunch of time having to load the car up, travel to the tip, unloading and repeating (we can never get all the garden waste in the car in one go), we then have to valet the car too.

2. No Need For A Bonfire

On the whole bonfires are great. Especially when they’re in your memory with the rose tinted glasses on. The reality though, is much different, thick acrid smoke that seems to follow you all round the garden. Making you cough, and making your clothes smell disgusting. Plus there’s always that uncomfortable silence from the neighbours after you light your bonfire. And bonfires are so time consuming, what with tending the fire and clearing all the ash away when you’re finished.

3. Keeps The Garden Tidy

One of the main reasons for not keeping the shrubs under control is the thought of dealing with all the waste. If you had your own shredder, the pruning and shredding could be completed on the same day.

4. Saves Money On Mulches, Wood Chippings Etc.

A ton of wood chippings costs around £100 you will be producing wood chippings for free every time you use your shredder. You can renew your pathways, and mulch around your plants to prevent water evaporation, and suppress weed growth.

5. No Need To Hire A Skip

If you hire the services of a skip company to remove your prunings and garden waste, you will need somewhere to store the skip, this usually entails road side parking of the skip. This means you will also have the hassle of obtaining a highways permit, plus highway permits are for a set amount of time. If you haven’t filled your skip within that time you’re likely to get a fine from the council.

Then there’s the inevitable dirty mattress that has been dumped in your skip while you weren’t looking. Not necessarily a mattress but other people do tend to fly tip in your skips.
Plus there’s the cost of hiring a skip, our local skip hire company charges £105 for a  2-yard capacity skip (mini skip). So for the price of hiring a mini skip, you could buy an entry level garden shredder. Which can be used as often as you like without permits, hire charges or random old mattresses.

6. Saves Time

With no travelling to the tip, or walking the waste to the front of your property to fill the skip, you will save so much time. Our local council tip is around a 30 minute drive from us, add to that the amount of time spent queuing to enter and the drive home, and each car load takes an hour and a half. Last time we filled our car 3 times so that was the best part of a day wasted.

7. Eco-Friendly

No carbon footprint to be concerned about, and the waste from plants will eventually renourish the soil. To grow that amount of wood, the plants will be using nutrients from the soil, by mulching the plants with your own wood chips you will replenish the nutrients into the soil.

8. Cost Around The Same To Buy As To Hire 

For the average price of hiring a mini skip, you can buy an entry level electric garden shredder that can be used over and over for no extra cost. Whereas hiring a shredder incurs that cost every time you hire it.

9. Compostable Material Readily Available

If you compost regularly, you will probably always be on the lookout for more “brown” materials like wood, twigs, etc. All of which you’ll be producing every time you shred your plant waste.

10. No Paying For A Service You Don’t Use Regularly

Our local council runs a service for collecting garden waste, you pay for it annually but it’s worked out on a weekly basis. During the cold, winter months when nothing much grows, you’ll find yourself not using the green bin. Why pay for someone to take away all that nutrient dense garden waste, and then go and buy soil?

Plus for those months you don’t use the service you’re still getting charged.

There are 10 good reasons to buy a garden shredder, we hope you’ve found it interesting and of some help.

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