Please recommend a good small scale garden "waste" shredder? Have some Amazon birthday vouchers burning a hole in my pocket

[whooptifeckindo]

Can you recommend a good shredder for me? For a number of boring reasons, I've never composted before but am about to start now. I would prefer not to sit and hand chop/shred bigger stuff to stick in the compost pile so I thought I would invest in a mini shredder. A leaf blowing combo one looks good but I don't want to get one that does that if it turns out to be a pretty temperamental shredder. I'd sooner have a good shredder and rake leaves by hand - not a very big area anyway.
Any suggestions?

In my experience the leaf blower/collectors don't work well if the leaves are wet. Also, if you have tons of leaves and can actually pick them up you will spend ages emptying the bag.

As for shredders the biggest potential problem is the narrow part of the feeding mechanism. They will be broadly funnel shaped, therefore, wide at the top to feed stuff in but they narrow down going into the blades. On some machines this bottleneck is very narrow and the blades will not actually drag a backlog into the machine. This means you have to use something to prod the material through to the blades. That means you are effectively attached to the machine feeding loads through which is probably not how you imagine these machines will work! I speak from bitter experience. I spent £700 on a shredder with a 5cm opening at the blades. It will not self-feed and blocks if too much material is sent down the chute. I cannot use it commercially so it sits at home processing my own garden waste for the compost bins.

I hope this helps you in your decision.

Thanks. Very helpful.