Hey farmgirl
The DH mosied over the street to a neighbour and asked the tree guys very politely what would be happening with the clippings from the work they were doing in his garden. We are literally 100 ft away so they said if we take them all they would dump them on the drive. FREE. Cue happy dance emoji. Of course it's taken three weeks to move all those clippings.....

Dolly, you rock! Way to go DH.. fab! you are going to love it.. so many great things about that! Thanks so much for sharing!

We had a similar happening last fall. The local power company(fortis) had a tree pruning outfit clear branches, etc. away from the power lines. Davey Tree took out two huge birches that were hanging over the power lines. The guys bucked them up into 4 foot long pieces and stacked them for me. Instead of sending the ground up mulch into the truck to be taken away, they put it into a nice neat pile for me to use next year. Talk about a win, win, situation all around!

Most if not all tree guys will leave you their woodchips for free. They have so much of it that they actually pay to get rid of it. And it needs hauling. So if you take it from them close to where it's cut they're very happy campers. Our neighborsi building up soil by just having the tree guy in the area here bringing him any chips he's making around here. He dumps them 10 or so inches high in the backyard and waits until it's all soil. We also got lots of horse farms here and he also gets free compost from some of them. Seems as though nobody knows what to do with the horse poop anymore and the farms are glad to get rid of it. I've used this year's tree branches for mulch, plus the two trees we got cut.