Putting the garden to bed for winter can be a melancholy affair, so it’s wise to incorporate a few rewarding routines to enliven the process. None succeeds more amiably than an extended outing with the compost grinder or shredder.

A machine whose sole purpose is the pulverizing of large organic matter into smaller gobbets might seem an inessential extravagance, another noisy contrivance like the nefarious leaf blower, corrupting what should be a haunt of ancient peace and quiet.

Perhaps it is. But for anyone running large gardens -- particularly gardens abundant in leggy perennials, vines and canes -- a shredder can transform the drudgery of dealing with their debris into an enlivening enterprise.

Gardeners who’ve wrestled with coils of clematis prunings or accummulations of Jerusalem artichoke stalks know how difficult such material is to deal with. Putting it out for garbage collection is out of the question. So is burning.

But this tough leggy stuff does not go gently into a compost heap either. Thick and woody, it resists decomposition, instead forming intractable mats like the knitted twigs of a beaver dam. Trying to turn a heap of these entanglements is an invitation to hernia. Months later the stems are still there, impervious to the high principles of composting.

Gardeners with abundant space can, as I used to, simply dump this organic debris in a secluded corner and wait a year or two for it to eventually rot. But I always resented trundling the raspberry canes and fireweed stalks off in this way, and as often as not their piles would be lost to stinging nettles or quack grass, and contribute nothing to the garden.

A shredder transforms this litany of dissatisfactions into something altogether wonderful. Its purpose is simplicity itself: to chop tough, coarse, thick, woody stuff into small bits that will more readily decompose.

The off-beat model I use was manufactured by an ingenious retiree (whose name and location I shall not give you, no matter how forcefully you plead), a person blessed with exceptional skills in both gardening and metallurgy. He’d welded it together from steel plate in his back yard as a prototype. Powered by a 5-horse Briggs and Stratten gas motor, a vertically-mounted steel cutting blade whirls inside a large chamber. Stalks are fed in through an aperture at the top; grinding and gnashing ensues; heaps of shredded fluff emerge from a chute at the bottom. The entire apparatus is welded onto a sturdy 4-wheel wagon, much like the one I used to drag around on my Toronto Telegram paper route, so the shredder can be wheeled to wherever debris has been piled.

In the two years since I acquired this beauty -- I call it Beelzebub from its fierce roaring -- I feel my life has been transformed.

It first comes into play in midsummer when we do a cleaning sweep through the ornamental gardens, producing large heaps of delphinium, foxglove and other stalks, along with prunings from the spring-flowering shrubs. These are ideal shredder fodder, packed with fresh green matter. Shredded, each heap occupies at most one quarter its original volume.

Around the same time, the broad bean stalks get processed, along with garlic tops and Russian kale plants, roots and all. One’s careful not to include dirt or stones which can both blunt the blade and be fired back out like shrapnel.

The autumn vegetable patch produces great piles of corn stalks, blackberry and rapberry canes, comfrey and borage plants and squash vines. I don’t include either tomato or potato plants, for fear of their spreading the dreaded late blight which is such a nuisance in our parts.

Contributions from the ornamental gardens include sunflower stalks, monkshood, Shasta daisies, campanulas, herbaceous hibiscus, summer phlox, lamb’s ears and sundry shrub prunings. Again, I don’t add peony or rose foliage in the mix, for fear of spreading diseases. (Rose prunings I simply throw outside the fences, where accommodating deer strip them bare.) A late winter swing might include prunings from trees and shrubs, clematis and grape vines.

Once Beelzebub has gnashed the stuff to shreds, I heap it inside a standing tube of galvanized wire about a metre in diameter and two metres tall. There’s no need to fuss with consecutive layers or compost activators the way afficionados do -- just pile it up and let it go!

Fermentation begins within days, the piles quickly becoming too hot to touch, as billions of bacteria, fungi, algae and actinomycetes set about breaking down the organic matter. After a week or two, as fermentation slows from lack of oxygen, I break open the cage and either restack the near-compost for a second cooking or spread it in the gardens as mulch.

Returned to the earth from which it came, this, like all compost, contributes mightily to healthy soil and a more productive garden. I can live with the shredder’s brief bursts of noise and modest consumption of gasoline knowing that it is taking what might otherwise be waste and transforming it into life-sustaining humus.