Shredder saga

I hired the shredder yesterday and spent a large chunk of the day shredding (as you might have guessed).

The shredder I got has a finicky appetite. It likes sticks, long straight sticks, not too dry (they break off and sort of "float" in the hopper), and not too wet (it gums up). It doesn't like leaves or any soft, fleshy stems.

Other than bags of leaves and soft, fleshy stems, most of what I had to shred were dry vines from where my neighbour killed the Virginia Creeper and Ivy growing on the shared fence. It was a heck of a job feeding in those curvy, slightly chewy vine segments.

To convince the shredder to eat the vines, sometimes I had to give it a treat of a long straight stick. Though I was a bit of tease. "Here you go shredder, here's a stick - eat it with those vines." And the shredder would start eating the vines "grumm, grumm, grumm, grumm" it would say and bite at the end of the stick. Ha! Fooled ya, I'd yank the stick back out of the hopper. Sometimes though the shredder would get a good bite on the stick - and that would be it, down went the stick. I lost a few bamboo support canes this way.