One of the advantages of having a garden with lots of water in the ground is stump removal!
Over the last few years I’ve taken on a total of three plots at the community garden, and ended up with a lot of fruit trees. At one point I had five plum trees, three of them full sized, and I just needed to get rid of a few. The plum tree that used to be part of this stump was also too close to the greenhouse, and its roots had worked their way into the greenhouse and were sucking all the nutrients out of the ground. One of the previous gardeners also planted a number of trees too close to each other, and so some of these needed to be removed.
Anyway, I’m done cutting down trees for the moment, and on to stump removal.
The picture above is the second full sized plum tree stump I’ve removed. I learned a lot from the first tree. Most importantly is plum trees, and I hope the other fruit trees I have stumps for too, don’t appear to like their roots to be sitting in water.
Here’s a close up of the stump. Do you see how all the roots go outwards, and are at about the same level? None of the roots go down into the water table.
All I had to do was go around with a pruning shears (secateurs) for the smaller roots and a saw for the larger ones, and cut them off.
Then I could just roll the stump out of the hole. The picture above is the loose stump just sitting on the ground.
I had a stump that hadn’t gone down to the water table and I didn’t know what to do with it so it sat on the grass for many months over winter and now it’s sprouted new shoots, what’s all that about? strange eh
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for the comment. You have a really nice blog!
I must admit, I haven’t figured out what to do with my stumps either. They are almost too heavy to lift, and I don’t have a good place to take or put them. I guess they’ll just sit around until they rot. I’m pretty sure mine are all dead now, as they haven’t had any signs of life for more than a year.
Here’s my plan for stumps (and I don’t even intend to remove them from the ground first; too much work!) I have several stumps around the place that I don’t want resprouting (and Blackwoods are notorious resprouters) so I’ll be innoculating them with Mushroom mycelium. The Mushrooms should, in theory, kill off the stump, and I should get some Mushrooms for breakfast. The only trick is finding the right Mushroom variety… there are not too many Mushrooms that like fruit-tree wood.
In the worst case I’ll find a suitable fungus, even if it doesn’t result in a harvest, but in my situation I’m confident that Shiitake are worth a try. Good experiment coming up.
I like that idea!
I wasn’t going to remove my stumps at first, but one was really in the way. Once I realized how straight forward it was to remove that one, I’ve decided to give the others a try too.
I killed them off first by covering them with black plastic ground cloth for a year.