Stump Removal

My favorite daughter called yesterday to ask if I have a "saws-all" because her bamboo is crowding her wooden fence and she wants to cut back the clumps. Well, I do have a reciprocating saw and I needed to finish removing two wax leaf ligustrums that had grown to about four feet tall on the property line next to our neighbor's driveway. Sweety requested this and I didn't want to do it, but once I cut them down to stumps, I saw that she was right.

This seemed like a good time to get the stumps out and take some pictures so H could see what I did. So here is the first stump already out of the ground. I just ran the saw around the stump about 10 inches from it's center and pretty much at 90 degrees to the ground. This only took a minute. Then I took the grubbing pick and working around the perimeter of the stump, I pried from under the center of the stump until it came loose. Took about 4 or 5 minutes of work.

Here is the first stump out of the ground.


Here is a better picture of the tools.

The second stump required another trip around the base of the stump with the saw as it had some extra roots underneath it. On the second round, I tilted the saw at about a 45 degree angle to try to get those lower roots. You can see how much deeper the hole is on the second stump due to it's deeper roots.



Finally, I used a spading fork to break up the soil, added some peat moss, and worked it into the clay soil with the fork. Meanwhile, Sweety went out to get some centipede grass to cover up the bare spot. Unfortunately, there is none available right now, so we'll work on that later.

H, here is the blade I was telling you about. It is a Piranha Wood/Pruning blade from Black and Decker. It is fairly flexable, but it cut really nicely and did not break.