Not a gardening question. I am not a gardener. I just want to get rid of overgrown vicious weed stumps that previous antisocial tenants let grow for years without giving a toss.
I cut all green parts in February and "glyphosated" them, then covered the whole plant in black bin bags to kill the plant. It looks like the stump at the base is dead, but it's still 5-6 cm diameter x 1 meter high.
What do I need to cut it off? I don't want to spend too much on it.
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The plants may also be shallow rooted so try lifting with a garden fork.
I presume you mean something like sycamore tree stumps (most common offender). Though round here mountain ash is more of a problem.
If you leave about 3' of stump on something woody of about that size then a garden fork, trenching spade and a sharp axe will get the stump and most of the roots out if you dig down around it.
Levers can allow you to put a lot of force to tear the roots out of the ground if you do it right. You might also need a brick to jam into the hole to act as a fulcrum. Don't get your fingers in the nip!
A pruning saw for gardening will let you cut it off at the base. The cheapest option that would be reusable for DIY afterwards would probably be a ripsaw with the coarsest teeth you can find from a DIY shed.
If you have a reciprocating saw, and can dig a hole beside the root, then cheap "greenwood" blades are quite effective cutting them IME.
Umm, do you have a truck?
chainsaw with a blade that you expect to throw away afterwards
5-6cm? A “vicious stump”? Hardly! A bit of sweat and hacking about with whatever tools you have to hand should have that out in minutes.
Tim
I have one over 2 foot diameter just above ground level (en0ugh to cause problems with car)that is a real problem,not a small weed like yours
Drill a few 1" holes in the top and fill them with potassium nitrate or ammonium sulphamate and a trace of copper sulphate to inhibit the antirot enzymes remaining in the tree stump.
That way if it is really really dry again next year you can burn it out or after a few years it will disintigrate by fungal rot from the inside.
You may need to use a scaffold pole to get a larger stump out - that is how I got my dead pear tree stump approx 2' diameter out eventually. The ground still settles there and needs extra top dressing every year.
Don't cut it off. Use the 1 meter stump as a lever, and hack through the roots with an axe, and pull and shove an haul the stump out.
5-6 cm diameter shouldn't put up much of a fight.Cutting it off will leave a lower stump to trip over, possibly for decades.
Thomas Prufer
Two words: stump grinder
The local service providers use a much larger and heavy machine, where the machine is less affected by the stump grinding action. The machine can be a tracked vehicle, allowing it to traverse a slight incline safely. (But at the work site, the ground must be level next to the tree.) I would probably avoid letting them drive that thing over a septic field. It's that heavy.
The head sweeps from side to side. The larger machines are semi-robotic and there's a remote so the operator can stand where ever they like to view the action. On the semi-robotic machine, the head sweep is automatic, and the operator does not need to move the controls to move the head from side to side. The operator uses the X-Y controls to advance the machine forward as the stump "disappears". In effect, the operator controls the "feed rate".
The operator usually starts with a chain saw, and brings the stump right down to flush with the ground. Then the stump grinder can bring the stump a foot below grade. You can put a little earth on top and pretend it was never there. The videos on the web, on youtube, are disingenuous. The operator does not seek to grind stumps that are a foot high, because that's a waste of his time on a fixed price job. You lower the stump first with the chainsaw, so that you get the best value from the machine. The machine then takes the stump from flush (which you might have tripped on), to one foot below grade.
How low it will take the stump down, is a function of the wheel size on the grinder, the length of the head assembly, and how low the hydraulics can drop it.
And while all the material you can find on the subject suggests waiting until the stump "ages" for a year, operators here will grind stumps that are only a month old.
Paul
(...)
All true -- and digging a two-foot stump out by hand will soon make a operated stump grinder look very reasonably priced. BTDTGTTS.
However, I think: overkill for a 5-6 cm stump... ratchet strap from the base of one to the top of another, pull hard, axe to the roots, etc. etc.
Thomas Prufer
A 6cm stump can be removed with almost anything. Almost any hand or power tool. How it's a problem for the OP I'm far from clear. A stump grinder would be silly.
... unless you cut the stump off level with the ground. *Then* getting it out with hand tools becomes troublesome, for lack of a "handle", and I would wish for a stump grinder:-)
Drilling lots of holes in a stump and putting a high nitrogen fertilizer in the holes is often recommended. The one time I tried it on an apple tree stump of
8-10", it had no appreciable effect...Thomas Prufer
Drilling lots of holes in a stump and putting in a lot of firework contents and igniting it works well too.
I lit a fire over a leylandi stump That worked.
Common mistake. When removing a small-ish tree or larger shrub then leaving about 4 to 5 feet of trunk above ground makes its much easier to remove the stump later if you have to resort to digging around the root ball and chopping at the roots.
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