But convenient? Not so much. And not cheap either. We once found a half kilo of rice husks at a store similar to Home Depot over in San José. A half kilo for about ₡1,500 colones. I would rather drive the hour and load up on huge sacks for ₡1,000 colons. Ah well, back to the ICE trucks.

I was helping a friend with measurements on her new home when I wandered out into the driveway. That’s when I spotted it: a pile of wood chips! And not just one pile, there were several. Alright, you have to be hungry for mulch and top dressing to start waxing poetic about a pile of chips, but I was starving.

ICE, it turns out, doesn’t just trim trees back from their poles and wires, it brings in great big chippers to turn them from branches to chips. And then what? Then it just dumps the chips on the ground. Oh, the waste. Gardeners all over the country are hungry for wood chips and ICE just dumps them.

It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is. No one in management has heard of “waste not, want not” and I am not going to tell them because then I would have nothing for my yard.

Remember, I have a big yard and big gardens. So far, I estimate that my gardener and I have loaded and brought home four cubic meters of wood chips. Enough for all the vegetable gardens and a start on the zig-zag garden. With those chips and some nice cow manure, we will make short work of those gardens and the rainbow gardens as well.

Then I think we will stockpile the rest of the chips and let them mature. Nothing like mature well-rotted wood chips to mix with some lime and nasty dirt. Just wait until we are finished with it all. Ahhhhh.

So, I found my secret stash just by accident. As for you, my fellow gardener, you are going to have to follow those ICE trucks around. Maybe, if you are really lucky, they will be putting them in a dump truck instead of just dumping them on the ground. Then you can just shout: “Follow me!” and can get them to dump them on your driveway