Wood chips into soil?

once I belonged to a community garden that belonged to a church. They let some landscape contractor dump wood chips on a spare acre.

It was really interesting to watch what happened when it rained.

All the different mixes of wood chips would start steaming, some more than others.

So I picked my wood chips from the hottest pile, and used that to make some truly primo soil.

I mixed it with a cubic yard of wildflowers, and a few cubic feet of orange berries, and about 100 pounds of potatoes.

Also a bunch of health food store garbage, like pulp from making smoothies.


Hope you can get some Primo wood chips for your garden.

The carbon sucking/ alteration of chemistry is very much related to particle size. Sawdust will react a lot faster than wood chips.

If you can maybe do one compost pile with sawdust and one with wood chips. There should be some difference.

Normally I would think the wood chip one would be more useful but you never know.

Well im not sure where to post this but i figure it can go along with this thread....

The bins of soil had warmed up to about 15 degrees above ambient temp in the basement. And had slowly calmed down, I then flipped the beds over as to see if there was enough oxygen in the bottom to not go funky (all is good).

I have now planted a random cover crop of sorts to get the beds active before i start using them. During the throwing of seeds i noticed some movement on the top soil layer...

Low and behold fucking soil mites! Im under the impression most are okay or good for soil and not to be worried.... Again im using some old soil from outside and my worm bin castings i believe have a small amount of mites in it...

I have layed down some avocado ( was going bad wife was going to throw out so i snagged it up) to attract the mites to see what's going on... I've managed to spot what i think are 3 different types with one being big round red and slow moving, one redish brown and fast as fuck and another light tan colored and fairly fast as well...

Any input would be great on mite identification or worries, its hard to find info on them... Also sorry for the shit photos!!





Side note mites help break stuff down from my understanding, hopefully aid in the wood chip composting!