does this mean you will have to have a new name????
The last time I had a stump ground out it cost me $150....and it was only a small tree.
My sympathy's on the loss of a landmark.
Linda c

Fourth time is a charm....grin....

LOL, no, I think I'm good now thanks!

(Linda - $300 for seven, of which two were around 3' diameter. Not bad!)

Loss of landmark=good mulch. Not sure the mulch is as good as the landmark was though! Stumps make me think of Shel Silvertein's The Giving Tree. You'll have to find a new spot to have food.

That is so sad! Are you having a resulting identity crisis?

What advice do you have about removing stumps? We have several that we want to get rid of. Some of them are still trees at the moment, but we want to put different trees there. We have very limited space in our back yard (it's smaller than the one we had in Venice), and I want specific fruit trees - not the ones we happened to get, including an ornamental peach tree and a matched pair of plum trees that gave us 12 plums last year and none this year. Anyway, I am interested in how you went about removing your stumps.

Lars

Jessica - Thanks so much for your concern. I'm happy to say that I'm entirely at peace with it all!

Lars - For me stump grinding was a matter of some guys coming in with a machine that as I understand it (wasn't home) just goes back and forth, chipping away at the stump, down to seven inches below grade. Was deeper an option? I don't know, didn't ask, didn't matter to me. I've been told that there are is also a chemical that you can readily buy where you drill holes into the stump, pour it in, and it promotes rot. Apparantly this still takes time to run its course, it's just an expediter. I would definitely research the environmental impact before using it, esp if I were planning to plant "food" in the soil. If you really need the entire root systems ripped out, I suppose there are also backhoes...

Good luck, I know your fruit trees mean a lot to you. There's lots that I would do differently if I were starting over with this house, not the least of which is invest in the landscaping early on. The yard takes time to mature, while most things inside are instant gratification and can wait.

Wood uses a lot of nitrogen when it decomposes. If you want to use the method of drilling holes in the stump, pour high nitrogen fertilizer in the holes. Still, it will take time. For quick results a stump grinder is the way to go. Then, you can use the chips as mulch. If you want to incorporate the chips into soil for growing things, add high nitrogen fertilizer to compensate for what the decaying wood chips use up. This is safe, even for vegetables, providing you don't use a lawn fertilizer containing herbicides or pesticides. I use an all purpose lawn and garden fertilizer for this. If you are strictly organic in your gardening, grass clippings, cotton seed meal or alfalfa pellets are pretty good sources of nitrogen, although a little less potent.

Jim

The stump I paid $150 to have ground away is still sinking.....and that was about 15 years ago....maybe more.
It's hard to believe the amount of root there is under ground and how long it break to break down.

FOAS, sorry you lost your place to sit, have a snack, & contemplate the world. Stumps can be cool things. You could have saved the $300 though.

When we purchased this house there were 9 mature arborviteas planted as foundations plants on two sides of the house (!). They were planted in 1965 & had mostly overgrown the entire house. It was like a cave inside...couldn't see out the windows because of the trees.

Three days after we closed on the place we had the trees removed plus 4 old lilacs. It was costly & DH was too cheap to have any of the stumps ground. :( He's a Colorado boy & figures he can do most anything armed with his pick, ax, & shovel so he told me he would dig the stumps. Yeah, right. It was a Wednesday when the trees/lilacs were cut down & hauled away.

Come Saturday morning, DH is at our marina (just about 300' from the house) sitting at the pavillon picnic tables with his marina buddies sipping Dunkin Donuts coffee & munching on a donut (about 6:30 a.m.). Obviously, the subject of the tree removal came up since everybody had to drive right past our house to get to the marina. The guys were razzing DH bad about the stumps. :)

I'm standing in the kitchen loading up the ice chest for DH to haul down to the boat with the weekend's food/drinks. Suddenly, the entire house starts to shake, the windows are rattling, the floor is vibrating, & there's this loud, deep, rumbling engine noise. At first, I thought a military plane from the USCG was landing on the roof! Hustling to the living room, I looked out the window & saw a piece of heavy equipment that looks exactly like this...

It's a boat travel lift. Yep, the guys decided to pull the stumps with chains attached to the boat lift! There was about a dozen guys walking behind the lift. By the time I'd tossed on a pair of shorts, T-shirt, & shoes they already had the chains hooked up to the first stump. By now, the wives had shown up & were huddled together on our driveway watching their DHs. I joined the woman.

Inside 30 minutes they had all the stumps out of the ground & our site looked like a stump dump! (I don't know if the rest of the country has stump dumps? Maybe, that's a New England thing?) Anyway, the guys were huddled together discussing what to do next.

Well, anybody that owns a boat over 25' almost assuredly also has a pick-up truck. So, they all hiked back to the marina & drove their trucks down to the house. One by one, our dockmaster winched those stumps over to the trucks, slipped the boat slings underneath the stumps, lifted them up, & sat them down one in the back of each truck just like laying a baby down in a cradle. Another 30 minutes goes by & all the trucks are loaded. I hopped in the cab with DH & we caravaned to our town transfer station. A little fast talking at the guard house got us in the dump without having to pay for all the trucks that were not registered to Mystic residents. DH is, afterall, an attorney so he's good at "fast talking". :)

After having the transfer station's crane lift the stumps from the pick-ups everybody caravaned back to the marina. The guys lined their trucks up at the boat power-washing station & soon all the trucks looked shiny & clean again.

By noon, the guys were back at the picnic tables after having spent the morning playing with their "boy toys". The stumps were gone & the mess cleaned up.

Now, I'm not necessarily recommending this method of stump removal for everyone but you gotta admit it's unconventional, did get the job done quickly, & without all that mess of wood chips everywhere.

Was it cheaper? Not sure. Probably, not. Saturday night DH bought several cases of beer & 15 pizzas. rofl

/tricia

That's a great story, Tricia. Well told.

For those with no boat travel lift near by, I've heard of pulling stumps with a tow truck. That obviously would be limited to smaller stumps, not big trees.

Jim

Good story Tricia! For us guys it's always fun to use overkill or non-conventional methods "because we can." Now even if I could get the boat lift into my back yard, I think the 3' oak stumps would have given it a run for the money. I did save $195 less $30 for a 100' rope which I used along with my pickup truck to pull out a handful of overgrown spiria (sp?) That's what I was doing at 6:00 this morning in order to get them out before the landscapers showed up. Maybe I'll spend some of that $165 savings on beer!

I had some ugly hedge type bushes in the back by my swimming pool and the neighbor kid came and cut them down then pulled up the stumps with his truck for $100, LOL, and I planted two peach trees there.

Fast forward about 10 years and I have a dying Chinese Elm and a messy and bug ridden Box Elder that I want gone. For $100 he takes down the Chinese Elm, cuts it into transportable sized pieces and hauls away the brush, then fixes the pool fence where he dropped a limb on it.

A couple of weeks later and several hours of work smarter, he wants $200 to take down the box elder. It's still way cheaper than those tree places, so it's a deal. He cuts down the old box elder, cuts the wood into pieces, transports it away and cleans up the brush, then fixes the pool fence AGAIN where he dropped a limb on it, LOL.

I still have two stumps that need to be ground, so thanks for the reminder FOAS. Heck, if you were closer, I'd lend you a stump. (grin)

Lars, here we have stump grinding services that come to your house and grind the stumps. They are in the phone book under "stump grinding" so I'm assuming it's probably in California too.

I did do the "drill holes and fill with stuff that eats stumps" thing about 8 years ago when I took down the Chinese Elm. The stump is still there.

Annie

I have trees up to 14' tall now. A "tree service" comes in with a special truck with a thing that looks like four shovels on the back. The truck drives the blades into the ground on all four sides of the tree. Then it lifts the tree up, tilts it forward, and drives away. Later another truck comes back with a load of dirt and plugs the hole per our agreement.

If the trees are nice the tree service might knock some off the bill as they can sell it elsewhere. I can get $1500 for a hundred and I'm by far the cheapest farm in the area. I'm supposed to be getting more for the big ones and have to get with the tree people as my last check was a bit light.

: )
lyra

After the floods of 1993, I lost 3 big trees in the way back...each with trunks about 20 to 35 inches in diameter.
After paying the bill for taking them down, I decided to leave the stumps, I told the tree guy to cut them close to the ground. in short order the vinca covered most of them....but for the oak....which I can still see if I push the vinca aside.

"Posted by foodonastump -----For us guys it's always fun to use overkill or non-conventional methods "because we can." "

Oh yes we sure can. LOL

dcarch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp86Mcfj9tU&feature=related

300 bucks for seven stumps sounds like a great deal to me. Sorry to hear about the loss of your trees. After two ice storms back to back in two years I still miss the trees....not even going to think about what I paid for clean up. OY!

David

When the tornado came through 3 years ago or so, we lost lots of trees. The service we found (I think they were Larry, Daryl, and Daryl) took down all the trees, cut them up, cleaned the area, AND ground the stumps...for $100 each. Ofcourse, they didn't have to grind ALL stumps since about 21 of the trees were uprooted, LOL.
Sherry

Larry Daryl and Daryl............ lmao! I remember them.

We recently had 17 stumps grinded (or grounded)! LOL! At $50 a stump. Some stumps were larger than other stumps but they just rounded it out to equal $850. We thought we got a deal. Some of these stumps were huge live oak stumps left over from the cleanup after hurricane Rita...been 5 years now.