This week's challenge

Get a long SDS bit and fill it full of holes and then let it rot or break bits off with a crow bar if you need the exercise.

The most effective way I've fount of reinstating the ground where there is a stump, although not the simplest, is to dig a hole about four or five feet in diameter as an annulus round the stump, chopping off all roots I come to with an axe, mattock or saw at the periphery of the hole and at the stump. By the time I ge to the tap root, if any, the stump can be bent over and remainiing roots chopped off about 18" to 2ft. below surface level. Then just fill in and treat as cultivable ground

_+1. You may need to add soil or compost to level things off..

They'll blunt your chainsaw in a moment, and you'll not see them coming. I had a lot of opportunity to practice sharpening on one job.

The sort of disc that has a chainsaw chain wrapped around it will carve out a lot of wood pretty effectively - until it hits something hard.

A gas axe would probably make a sizeable dent in it, it might keep burning once you'd got it going well.

It's more usual to accelerate rotting with chemicals - drill some holes in it and add potassium nitrate and hot water, then leave it a couple of months.

Agreed and fill the holes with ammonium sulphamate (NOT Sulphate) and cover or plug them to stop it being washed out. This used to be sold as Root Out before the Eu banned it for that application but still allowed it for sale to scatter over the compost heap. You can get this on ebay as a compost accelerator.

Once we are out of EU I expect this nonsensical rules will remain in place

There's a reason JCB excavators are popular :)

A stick of dynamite perhaps? All sorts of stuff gets inside growing wood. Down my road a tree has incorporated several sections of chain link fence. The only way to get the tree out would be to fit a new section of the fence since its in the middle of several of the limbs and the trunk. Brian

In article <20190228164103.7418ecf5@Mars>, Rob Morley snipped-for-privacy@ntlworld.com writes

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Recently tried this with an apple tree stump;

-tried putting burning charcoal in the holes after the saltpetre solution had soaked in and dried, -no joy. I then drilled holes as low as possible into the trunk from the side so they intersected the vertical hole I had drilled originally. In this way I could blow air onto the glowing charcoal at the bottom of the original holes. This created a blowlamp-like roaring flame which gradually burnt out a hollow space in the stump. Had to repeat for each of the vertical holes. I think it almost wore out my dinky little compressor. Took about

I attacked the stump with the SDS chisel-bit and an axe this morning. It is working - slowly. The problem is that to get through the wood the chisel bit has to be almost as sharp as a wood chisel. So I gave it a good sharpening before starting. But as soon as it hits a stone it gets blunt. It might break up the stone, but then won't get through the wood again until it is resharpened. So far I've found another eight pebbles, and I've only got through 4 or 5cm of the stump.

It is not possible to drill through wood with an SDS bit. It's just not sharp enough. It only slowly grinds away the wood and soon starts getting hot enough to raise smoke. If I can make some holes, though, I'll try chemicals to increase the breakdown of the wood. Also, digging round the stump is very difficult due to restricted room. It's barely 50 cm from the fence, and not even 10 cm from the granite setts lining the drive. I have no doubt the roots go under the drive, but it is not possible to get to them.

Cornus is a pretty hard wood, harder than ash or maple, although not as hard as oak. For anyone interested, there's an interesting table of wood hardnesses at

The answer is obvious....

You need to hire a stump grinder!

I had a man and a stump grinder and he went through 60 tree stumps in less than 3 hours......

Afraid not. They wouldn't go near anything with stones buried in the soil, let alone hidden in the tree itself. The stump grinder's teeth are hard, but they would be smashed to pieces by the pebbles. In fact, I had some trees taken out several years ago. The only stump they wouldn't grind was not far from the Cornus, in exactly the same pebble-covered soil.

No, the guy turned up at 4.00pm with what looked like a mini caterpillar JCB hybrid on a trailer.

It was all remote controlled and the thing had tracked wheels like a tank, had a swinging arm with what looked like a pair of counter rotating discs with what looked like chunky teeth.

I had two rows of twenty trees and one row of ten trees and then 10 scattered about.

It was all done by 7.00pm with sixty piles of mixed wood chippings and soil and stone....

I did warn him that the soil was stony and he said it's not a problem...

P.s. it was like a scaled up version of robot wars!

He even hit some solid concrete in the ground a few times where there had been 4x4 fence posts.... Not a problem apparently for his machine.

The one we had is similar to this one:

Get some potassium nitrate (ebay) drill holes in wood (root) fill with potassium nitrate wait six months and start a fire over it, usually will burn out.

ANFO works well but not in suburbia,

I've seen bicycles embedded in trees.

I had a go at the stump this morning. The SDS chisel bit didn't make much progress as there were a lot of crossing fibres where the roots started. So I tried the angle grinder (with metal-cutting disc). It slowly cut through the wood. Well, very slowly, and actually seemed to burn through it rather than cut, as sap was boiling out of the cut! Also, it left the cut surface black; that had obviously been heat-hardened, which didn't help. Everything was going ok, if slowly, when the disc jammed. Unfortunately, the grinder continued turning, and left a neat hole in the centre of the disc. A stone-cutting disc was even slower than the metal-cutting disc, so I gave up and decided on using a hand axe with frequently resharpening after it hit the embedded stones - of which, I reckon, there were over two dozen in total.

Later I'll try to drill some holes very carefully, stopping if the bit won't advance easily, and fill them with potassium nitrate to help the stump rot more quickly.