Plants + Care

Free Wood Chip Mulch Delivered to My House? Yes, Please.

9 Comments
Mulch is a must to keep soil cool and moist.

[EDITED July 1ST 2015: Sadly, the company we wrote about below only takes orders from U.S. Addresses, even though their website clearly asks for “postal codes”. We’ve written them to ask about extending their reach to Canada and will update when we hear anything. In the meantime, arborists in Canada, does this spark any ideas?]

[EDITED July 5th 2015: We heard from About Trees regarding their service
not being available in Canada. It’s related to funding. Here is their
response: “Sadly our Kickstarter campaign did not get funded. One of the
main intents of attempting a Kickstarter for us was to expand
internationally. Since people did not invest in the funding we can not
personally foot the bill for all the extensive work that would go into
this expansion at this time. So sorry to disappoint we would have liked
to have been able to expand. Maybe some time down the road it will
happen. But for now its out of our budget.”

In the mean time, one of our readers found this nursery in Canada, Maple Green Tree Services, that does give out free chips.
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This is an exciting prospect. I’m always looking covetously at piles of wood mulch when I see arborists at work— chipping up all the branches they’ve removed—and wishing they would just dump it on my driveway instead of driving off with it to parts unknown. Now we can do that, with help from a service from a company called About Trees.

Arborist Mark Russell, of AboutTrees.com heads up a project where wood chips can be delivered to an address close to where the branches were chipped. Right now you can sign up on their website for free wood chips. How can they do this for free?

Tree services save a LOT of money when they recycle their wood chip mulch close to where they are working.  It saves a ton of fuel and THAT helps our environment!  This is why we created the free mulch program.

There are so many benefits to a project like this, not the least is saving diesel fuel and keeping mulch out of our overcrowded landfills.

Mark Russell explains;

 Since 1997 I’ve delivered mulch across the city to the dump sites, all the while knowing that I was passing people who would love it. The problem was  the inefficiency of tree services maintaining their own separate in-house mulch request lists. I realized that we needed one centralized list for maximum efficiency.  So we built phase one and people love it!

 The Free Mulch app from AboutTrees.com will be the fastest way for the clients to get their mulch.  It saves the tree service time and fuel, and for every connection the app makes it prevents an average of 2 to 5 gallons of fuel being needlessly wasted and 12-30 cubic yards of valuable material out of the landfill!

About Trees is now using Kickstarter to develop a smartphone app to match homeowners with those free mulch piles even more efficiently. The app sounds like a great idea, helping mulch givers and mulch wanters connect. It’s a little bit like an Uber for Wood chips, except you can’t order a specific day to receive your mulch, as it all depends on who is doing tree work in your area. There is a bit of the luck of the draw in the system, but hey, it’s free! You can sign up for a load of free wood chip mulch here on your browser:  FreeMulch.AboutTrees.com

 

Sarah

Sarah Battersby is a designer, writer and teacher who regularly hacks away at forest of lilacs and sumachs in the country. She wishes she’d never planted that goutweed.

9 comments

  1. My nephew on a large property gets huge loads of mulch from the crew that maintains power company lines in his area. A man who lives next to him called and asked if he could have some of it. Told to help himself, he then wanted to know if my nephew, older than the man, could bring it to him.

    I hope your mulch works out delightfully well and your plants benefit much.

  4. Sadly, I know many arborists who would love to donate their wood chips but can't. Liability of dumping on property where no binding contract is established. Stupid, but one can understand.

    1. Thanks for weighing in, Heidi. That's very interesting about the legal implications. But wouldn't it be possible for homeowners to sign some kind of waiver? . The About Trees site does state that you get what you are given, and you can't request anything special. And even though About Trees weren't able to expand into Canada because of funding issues, their program is working in the States. Where they seem to sue people at the drop of a hat.

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