Where does all our sawdust go? 5 uses for sawdust that you haven’t thought of

We used to get sawdust from a big mill by the truck load. We used it as bedding for our dairy cows. We had a large space in our barn to store it. Us kids job was to go load up the wheelbarrow and bring it down to the cow stable. Brings back memories.

Shouldn't that be called; wood dust?!

I used sawdust to smoke fish and meat. Mostly oak and beech.

About the blueberries/soil: adding coffee to your watering can does wonders for the nitrogen balance. Just a 10-1 ratio is already pretty good. I have a coffee machine that grinds beans and rinses itself every time I turn it on. That "coffee water" is perfect for my indoor plants!

for some reason I love the feeling of sandust between my finger tips

my neighbor uses hardwood sawdust to grow mushrooms for consumption, he says it works far better than old rotten wet logs

If anybody need sawdust from india, for bulk quantity pleas contact

Love your videos, keep them coming

Just as a heads up, from somebody who grows with over 40 blueberries, mostly northern highbush but also some southern highbush and rabbiteyes. I am in the Ohio river basin. We have clay. Lots of clay.

Blueberries don't like clay. Being a masochist, and as my children ADORE them, I planted them in heavily amended soil. As I used up my compost, I ended up having to purchase some, and $9 a cubic yard for a eight cubic yard truck load ( the truck doubled the price) and I was fine. Except my rabbiteyes slowely died, of iron deficiency, which is caused by pH that is too high.

The problem is not just the pH, but the buffering. Calcium is the enemy of low pH. I talked to our local State Ag Agent, and he figured out pretty quickly what I did wrong. They had the same problem with wood chipped mulched oak trees. You see the wood of many hardwoods is high in Calcium. Not that high, but for plants that like acidic soil, not the pH 6.0 that most gardeners consider acidic, but a pH as low as 4.0. Understand, pH is a logarithmic scale, so 4.0 is 100 time more acidic than 6.0.

I found a reference to the issue in a paper making article, as the source of the wood pulp determines the available calcium. It turns out conifers tend to have lower calcium residue in their wood chips compared to hardwoods. I've limited my wood chip compost to mostly pine, and save any I get for my blueberries. All my other plants love wood chip compost, and honestly I suspect if you have normal soil it won't be a problem. I have clay with a higher calcium/buffering content, so be careful.

It will take some extra work, but with some research you can find blueberries more tolerant of clay. This research is over 10 years old, and even then did not include the cutting edge newest cultivars. Duke (early, reliable crop) is mostly tolerant of clay, but the stand-outs were Reka (tart and early, great for baking, muffins to die for), and Elliot (late, with the berries ripening in three groups, great taste and keeps well in the fridge).

fine sawdust is what you get when it takes you a half hour to cut a 4 inch tree trunk with your chainsaw.

The industry uses it to make particle board!!

Boring.

Compost loos

The uses are rather small scale. Here in Finland coarser chips are used for bedding for domestic animals. I own a horse and the amount of bedding used at stables is huge. Due to the war the price of bedding has doubled in a year because a lot of timber was imported from Russia which is now boycotted. Horses cannot use any sawdust, fir and pine are great as the natural resin ties dust. They need to have bedding that does not spread dust as horses get sick of it. Too much resin can cause allergic reaction, and some wood species are toxic. Smaller sawdust is compressed into pellets and the pellets used as such. The pellet breaks open with moisture so does not create dust. If it is moistened and opened when put to the bedding (people do this because it gets so much more volume that way) it is dusty. A stable my horse lived earlier used half pellets, half fresh sawdust directly from a mill, and this was excellent. The resin bound the dust so less resin loose to bother the horse, and the finer dust created a thick and firm bedding that sucked moisture and was easy to clean. I recommend you to explore this business as I believe you could sell all nontoxic sawdust into good use.

And yes, after the horses have used it, it burns in a compost full of manure, and that is used for the garden and is great. Pure sawdust only creates a mulch layer to protect ground from weeds.

Another common high volume use has been to build sawdust tracks in the forest. A path with a firm sawdust bedding is wonderful to run and trail in the forest. Note that sawdust is very slow to degrade so these tracks last years and need no maintenance. In this use the sawdust that is not useful for horses is possible.

Finally, a new use is bioplastics, you could also explore this if you find a business nearby in that industry.

Jade, I like the idea that you can use the sawdust for the water puddles at the mill yard.

IN your CheKen NUGGET!.
ITS The TRUTH.

its good for taco bell taco filler

this was a great one thanks for sharing!

You don't sell any to paper mills?

Make wood pellets for smokers

I would use in in my garbage cans to absorb the moisture to keep down the funk and prevent maggots.

Add used motor oil or used cooking oil with the sawdust to make briquettes, especially for wood burning stoves, boilers and fireplaces.

Just up the road from the last place I worked was a joiners, they would produce bricks of saw dust for fires. Also I recently seen on you tube was dustcrete, where you replace sand with sawdust when making concrete, it seemed to work very well.

sawdust isnt much good for toilet paper

When I was a kid if someone puked in school the janitor would dump sawdust on it so that the other kids wouldnt hurl.

Dairy Queen????

mixing saw dust with wood glue works great as wood putty,to fill in holes in funiture making.

Nice to see a beautiful White-European woman sharing the knowledge of her people with her kin.

One use I was thinking about is particle board. One of the most common uses of particle boards is speaker boxes, and many home and car stereo speakers are made of particle board.

My Dad told me that they used to put sawdust in the hollers (it was West Virginia) and bury big chunks of ice (from creeks and ponds) in it. The sawdust would insulate the ice from the air and they would have ice up til August. This was before freezers became common.

i don't get it, people just wanna see your bodies . . the rest we give zero shits about, two second on google and you find fifty uses for saw dust, 49 of them are bullshit . . .now, take your clothes off

That's why the old steem powered sawmills were so efficient if they used a screw fed boiler and waste steel sawdust dryer pre injection to the fire box used alot in Australia up until 1960s when automation took over and mill workers began to cost more than machines and electricity was cheaper. Now the reverse could be said

Love the videos.

emerald saw dust mixed withe proper amount of diesel fuel makes an excellent sweeping compound for concrete floors to cleam TO REDUCE dust. i worked at the MPLS HONEYWELL PLAMT AND WE USED A COMMERCIAL BRAND FOR CLEANING ALL OF OUR FLOORS IN THE PLANT. IT COULD EASILY BE MADE AND SOLD IN 5 GALLON OR LARGER CONTAINERS.

Very interesting. I had never thought of any of those uses.

No pellet press yet?

great for hen house house

It's also fed to cattle.

My Dad used to put it in a smallish trash can, maybe 10 gal. dump gasoline in, mix it around till it was completely wet, then cover, worked great in soaking up oil. The gas would dissolve the oil, and the sawdust would soak up the oil, worked great. This was back in the 50's. Gas was cheap back then.

Just put it in baked goods, tell people that they're high in fiber.

What about wood pellets??

You are lovely.

We use it for bedding for horses

You need to purchase a pellet press and bag your own pellets for people that have furnaces that burn wood pellets…just mix a little paraffin with it to stick together.

Interesting ❤

I was expecting things like, MDF board, Ikea furniture and essential oils.

Sawdust, pressed into briquettes, make a great heat source when burned.

You forgot to mention sawdust is used to make wood pellets for furnaces.