If you dumped several truck loads of finely shredded wood waste on a plot of sandy ground, how much N will it take to recover from the breakdown of the mulch ?

Not sure about how much nitrogen is needed but if you get some dirt on top of it with a disk then it will help rot but from what I’ve seen it’s takes a good while to break down wood chips

There should be some kind of formula out there for such I would think........What is the carbon ratio of wood chips? Isnt it like 300:1 or something really high??.......Wouldn't you take that number though and put it in a formula to show how many N unitswould bring it down to a 20:1 ratio maybe??

Will the area grow crimson clover???

Cnc might be on to something this time. Dump it out, mix it in, plant clover on it

Also what I was thinking is that most of the time in the compost making process they mix "brown" and "green" together........If you could get a good stand of crimson clover established then you could dump the wood chips over the top of the clover and have your brown, green, carbon, and nitrogen in a pretty nice mix from the start.......If its poor soil though then it may not grow clover well enough to do that in the beginning.

Plan is to spread, mix and later overseed with wheat/clover. Not beach sand but definitely a texture group 1 soil with low OM.

I think you would be better off to do this in the Spring.......Decomposition is a lot driven by temp......I think you may see any fall crop you try to plant repeatedly suffer from N deficiency over and over .....A spring application would give it all summer to break down

It's bacteria that need the N for the decomposition.......I think doing this in the fall/winter would be about the same as making homeade wine that time of year.......Your mash isnt gonna work off well due to temp.......You're not gonna get the reaction you're wanting

There’s no timetable to the project. I can get the mulch hauled at no cost now

That's pretty awesome!.......

I've seen some say 30lbs per acre on freshly mulched clearings. This is coming from the guy mulching, though, not a soils guy directly. Your local NRCS may can give you some better info.

Idk about the Nitrogen, but I got two 7-16’ trailer loads of mulch put on my red clay garden and It made a huge difference.
I cut it in around September/October.

I’d suggest dump the chips now, disk them in, then over seed with annual ryegrass(the cheap cattle feed stuff not the improved varieties for lawns. That ryegrass will grow like gangbusters in the corner of a trailer, gravel, wood chips, anywhere. Put a little N on it a couple weeks after germination. Let it go all winter and into spring. You should have a lot of green manure from that come March/April. Cut it and let it lay. Put some clover down then if you like.

IMO, just say no to ryegrass. That would be a short term solution that creates a long term problem. It can become very dominant and choke out other plantings in the future. I've got it in food plots that I've been trying been trying to get rid of for years and years.
After a nuclear winter, 2 things that would still be present, cockroaches and ryegrass

That stuff is the devil. Aside from nesting habitat it's more or less starvation food for deer anywhere I've ever seen it growing. I wish I could find some type of clover or alfalfa that was as persistent as annual ryegrass. I notice it is in a lot of big box store wildlife seed mixes. I think they put it in there because it germinates and greens a field up so quickly in an effort to make you think it's good stuff. It takes a few years to eradicate it by spraying early enough to keep it from going to seed in the spring. There's always a few "hard" seed that didn't germinate the first year that will the second.

I’ve not had trouble cutting then burning it out with herbicide. I did this with a few plots when I hunted Washington county to reclaim log landings. But, no, it isn’t of much value for deer. My suggestion is for the fact that it’ll grow in concrete if you seed it there.