On 13/10/14 10:39, Nick Maclaren wrote:

To shred larger material, or very large quantities, one needs
a proper horticultural model. The cheap machines that claim to
do the job almost invariably have a lot of problems, but the
ones that don't are both very expensive and usually very large.
But that is all second-hand information.

I agree.

When a neighbour with a chainsaw helped me take 6' off a hawthorn hedge,
I hired the biggest chipper the hire shop had - it was one level down
from a tree surgeon's machine, but had powered feed.

I ran it flat out for 5 days and burnt about 6 gallons of petrol.

However now the war has been won, I might be interested in one of the
Bosch cog-crusher types for ad hoc pruning.

The problem I see is the domestic devices all have very tight throats
for safety reasons so sticking hawthorn in would be a non starter - or
any bushy material - but long thick twigs like ash would probably work
very well.