I applaude your desire to take advantage of a recycling opportunity, and a
free one, to boot.

Indeed, decomposing wood chips will tie up nitrogen, making it unavailable
to plants grown in the same soil. However, if you're just using them as
fill at the bottom of the planters, I would think the "tie up" factor would
be negligible at best, as the roots of your plants (annuals, I assume) will
probably be well above the chip area. I would, however, skip the layer of
leaves over the chips. I don't know why it would be desirable to add them,
and their addition could hamper drainage.

Another way to make use of this freebie could be to use them in your garden
paths or as a mulch on the surface of the soil in your beds. For the most
part, it's the mixing them into the soil that causes the nitrogen
availability problem.

If you're just looking for a simple planter bottom filler, I use styrofoam
peanuts in mine except when they're closer to the street and more likely to
"walk" in the night. Then I use whatever rocks, broken brick and other
heavy stuff I have on hand

Hope this helps, and happy gardening!

Suzy in Wis., zone 5


"Mark Anderson" wrote in message
.net...
For some reason, one of my neighbors rakes up all his decorative wood
chips every spring and replaces them. I don't know why he does it but he
does. Every year he throws them in the trash but this year I agreed to
take the old wood chips off his hands. I'm not sure exactly what kind of
wood they are other than they're decorative.

I just built a 3'x10'x18"(high) planter that I need to fill. This is a
lot of dirt. I hoped to line the bottom 3 to 6" of the planter with
those used wood chips which I would get for free. I plan to layer about
2" of composted leaves on top of that and then the rest would be my dirt
mixture (part sand, perlite with top soil).

Some discussions here in the past mention that wood depletes the soil of
nitrogen. Does anyone think there would be a problem if the wood chips
are deep into planter like this? Are there any weird chemicals on these
chips that I should be concerned about? The first year for this planter
will just have wildflowers whose roots don't go more than 12" but I hope
to plant bigger things like a bush or two in there next fall for next
spring.