Above-ground Stump removal ideas needed

[Tony]

I live near Pensacola, FL, and recently experienced Hurricane Ivan. Fortunately my home had minor damage, but my yard which I had invested much effort in landscaping these past few months has been decimated.

The biggest problem I face is figuring out the best way to handle the removal of two root balls from trees uprooted by the storm. The smaller root ball sits above the ground and is about 4' in diameter. The larger root ball is about 6' in diameter. I have already cut up the trunk portion of both trees.

I'm assuming that having the root balls lifted out of the yard by crane would be very expensive. Having them dragged out by tractor or similar device would likely damage a large portion of the yard (and the underground sprinkler system). I could have them ground, but I'm not sure if it is possible for a stump grinder to work on a root ball that sits totally about ground and is laying on its side.

Can anyone suggest anything I could do to best remove these? I don't want to take a chain saw to them because of the massive amount of clay-rich soil embedded in the roots. I had contemplated using a hose to try and wash the soil away from the rootball a bit at a time. I'm not sure if this would really even be feasible, though.

Any suggestions on what to do with these would be greatly appreciated.

Tony

[Roger]

If you or a friend has a power washer - or they can be rented, or bot from from Home Depot for 100-150 bucks - you could blast the root ball and remove much of the clay. Only need to remove enough clay to cut roots down to a ball-shaped dense mass. Then try rolling it out of the yard, up a ramp, and into a pickup. Never done this - just an idea.

[Rileyesi]

How about burning them before the 'chaos' dies down? Where I live it is illegal to burn stumps, but you might have a window of opportunity where the local laws are "bent".

I have no idea if this is even possible. Just a thought.

Good luck.

[Robert Morein]

Gouge a hole in the center with a chainsaw (the bigger the better). Put a bag of charcoal in it and light it. Should burn most of it.

[PrecisionMachinisT]

underground

Bury them deeper than they was, and any luck at all, they will re-sprout and a new tree will grow--depents a lot on the species and if there is suffient starches in the rootball......you will know if you start getting suckers to grow offa them as these will definately need trimmed if you only want a single trunk....

Im a machinist by trade, and am a nurseryman as a hobby--to me the whole gig reeks of possible opportunity...........anybody maybe need several hundred rooted trees that do well in Florida ????

[SteveB]

I have done this twice, and it IS work, but it works. We have sandy soil in Nevada where these trees were planted. We started digging them out by the roots, and used a big shop vac to remove the dirt as we went. This way, you could easily see the roots that were holding the thing. We cut those with a sharp double bladed long handled axe. Any type of chainsaw or regular saw dulls quickly. On one, we had a come along on it with a tight bind on it because we couldn't get the truck close. On the other, we had a chain to a four wheel drive truck. It was slow going, but in both cases at a time once it started to move, it popped out from there, breaking the remaining roots on its own.

Don't know if that would work with the type of soil you have. We had a neighbor who suggested the water blaster idea, but decided we would soon have a muddy moat. It was a chore, but they took only about three hours each. One was a eucalyptus tree, and the other a chinaball. Both trunks were about sixteen inches in diameter. If you haven't cut the main trunk yet, leave it a little tall, and this will improve your pulling leverage.

HTH. There is no easy way to do it.

Steve

[m Ransley]

Any good tree man will have a hydraulic log lifter-truck, it wont damage the lawn. But I imagine their prices now are way inflated

[Tony]

Lots of good answers in this thread that I'll have to look at.

Never having had a professional come out and do tree work, I can't say how inflated prices are right now. I can tell you that I was shocked when a colleague told me that he had a company cut two trees that had fallen in his yard. I'm not sure exactly how big the trees were, but I can't imagine that they were more than 40' tall. Both trees were already on the ground and all this company did was cut them into logs and haul them out to the curb for debris pickup by the county. For the 1st tree they charged him $475. The

2nd tree was $350. And that did not include removing or doing anything with the exposed root ball.

I bought a $150 Poulan chain saw and cut up our 3 similar-sized trees by myself.

Tony

[bumtracks]

maybe you could rent a Ryder Truck with insurance & the hydraulic tailgate lift and work it on to & into it.

[Oscar_Lives]

How do you remove an underground stump?

[Greg]

I have a neighbor who just paid $3000 to have a "Charley" tree cut up and hauled away.

[PrecisionMachinisT]

Hehe...

100 interesting and fun things to do with high nitrogen fertilizer.........

[John Hines]

With a backhoe.

[Stormin Mormon]

I'm with you, chief. Buy the saw and you can keep it when you're done. I got some safety training some years ago, and it's worth every penny.

Moving the clay is going to be a challenge. The pressure washer.... let us know if it works?

The one stump I removed, I used a sawzall, and a lot of blades. I got the cheep blades from Harbor Freight, so I didn't worry much about wearing the teeth off. And wear them out, I surely did.

After the roots are exposed and dry out, maybe kerosene and burn them out?

[Stormin Mormon]

HVAC in NY isn't paying enough. I oughta move to Florida and start a tree moval service?

[Stormin Mormon]

Tailgate and chain to hoist the thing out, and break the remaining roots?

[JerryMouse]

Is there some reason you can't blast 'em out?

Dynamite is easy to use. The guys who sell it can give you pointers.

[Tony]

Well, considering that one of the stumps is about 3' from my house, I'm a bit tentative about using such extreme measures. :)

Tony

[ameijers]

Ignore Jerry, he thinks he is witty.

I take it you don't live in the kind of neighborhood where you can just drag the rootballs to a disused corner of the lot, and leave them as habitat for small creatures? All sorts of things would be very happy living in the nooks and crannies. Failing that, simplest solution is to just clean out and deepen the holes they came out of, and bury them. If planting replacement trees makes that not an option, you are either facing a whole lot of manual labor with shovel and ax and maul and wedges, or a decent sized check to somebody with the equipment to get them out of there w/o trashing your lawn and sprinklers and such. Dirty wood like that will kill a chainsaw quick, and possibly you, too, from kickback when it jams. People who clear trees for a living, when they can get away with it, dozer the root balls and other chaff into bigass piles, soak with #2, and burn them. Unless you can leave them sit till weather washes dirt off, chipper guy won't even want to touch them- those dirt clods really cut blade life.

aem sends....

[Alan Sung]

That's not completely true. At a local golf course where they cleared some woods, all of the stumps were taken out with an excavator and placed in a huge pile. Then some special piece of machinery was brought in that looked like a 10 foot diameter cylinder, maybe 8-10 feet high. Inside the cylinder was a giant flail spinning at a high speed. The giant stumps were dropped in and what came out of this machine was a nice steady stream of rich looking soil. I think it was less than 30 seconds to reduce a stump of a 18" diameter tree to 'nothing'.

-al sung