The Tiger Lilies are done blooming, leaving 5 foot+ bare stems. Option 1 is to go around with a pruner and prune out the stems. Some years I do this mid-bloom and then again at the end. Option 2 takes two people, and the same amount of time, but we use the KombiSystem power scythe and cut them to the ground. In a couple of weeks they will be up 6 or more inches and be fresh and green again until frost. At that point they are much easier to cut a second time because no stems.
That's quite a pile of foliage! Something we don't want to waste.
Last fall we scored a new old chipper shredder and shredded all of our landscape waste. Below is the composted result of that episode. It spent the winter in a large drain tube cooking and for the past couple months I've been moving it back and forth from that damp spot, keeping it working. Its almost ready to use, but needs sifting.
At first we fought with the chipper and finally worked out that we could feed sheaves of lilies with the ends tidied up into the side chute and with no output screen it worked fine. But it refused to accept a "wad" of anything through the hopper. Once we figured out what would work, we made great progress. The chipper supposedly reduces the waste in a 10 to 1 ratio, but I would say its more like 5 to 1. Either way, its shredded to a consistency that will be easy to compost and turn,
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