Stumped on Stumps

It is hard to bulldoze dynamited rocks out of the ground however...with so many fractured pieces it is hard to get a bite with the blade on the, Don't get me wrong, dynamite has its place, and we know how to use it, but if the rock is small enough to move with a dozer, we prefer that first.

As for the rock...I must be rich and I do not even know it. I got about 15 billion more just like it out in the woods. Care to make an offer? :-)

Plowpoint, if you were a lot closer you could leave every one of those rocks across the front of our property and we would NEVER complain. Boulders make for great security and I LOVE ROCKS! No Joke. DH asked me what I wanted for our first anniversary and I told him a rock. On the morning of our first anniversary, a local landscaper pulled into the driveway and unloaded a huge round gray granite rock in our front yard for me and DH told me happy anniversary!

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I'm in my own little world, but it's ok. They know me here!

If I could find a girl that was happy with a hunk of granite I might just end up marrying her. All the women I know are happy with a rock but they want the ones that glisten.

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U.S. Constitution -10th Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

We call the sprouts regen. The regeneration growth that comes up from the stumps and roots. Popular and cherry are strong regen producers too.

Our livestock chow down on the regen so it is good fodder in many cases and I don't mind it coming up. After a few years of the animals eating the regen the stump eventually dies and rots away in the soil. We cut the stumps very low, close to the ground.

Cheers,

-Walter Jeffries
Sugar Mountain Farm
Pastured Pigs, Sheep & Kids
in the mountains of Vermont
Sugar Mountain Farm | All Natural Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids in the mountains of Vermont

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

*grin* I gave my wife a 10" diamond (blade) so she could cut granite rocks for me. She loves it. She's very into her power tools. We have beautiful lintels, sills, etc in our cottage which she cut from the waste granite we get from the near by stone quarries and sheds.

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Here in Maine anyway, you have to be very careful about grazing regeneration, and even cleared over areas very carefully...in fact I won't even do it. It is just not worth it!

That is because we have Black Cherry here and that type of tree likes sunshine and is fast growing. Often times after a clear cut, or on the edge of a field, it will sprout up first. If the leaves of that tree wilt, or die it creates naturally forming cyanide and just a few bites will kill your livestock...it does not matter what kind, cyanide is cyanide and kills indiscriminately.

I like rocks as well...don't get me wrong, just not in the middle of my fields. :-)

When I cleared some land behind my house, I ended up taking out 3 rock walls my ancestors had put here in the 1830's, and as I bulldozed I kept my eye on a few big rocks. One was a giant piece of slate. It was flat on two sides and about a foot thick, and about 4x4 feet square. I pushed that off to the side and later dragged it back to my house and tipped it up on edge in front of my flag pole. I am going to cut out a piece of stainless steel with my last name and attach it to the rock...

I have also built some serious rock walls of my own around here. Rocks are free, we have plenty of them and once built they last forever. Since 1994, I have probably built 1000 feet of rock walls around my house and in doing landscaping.

Just this past weekend, on Saturday, I wanted to make my wood stove a bit more efficient so I turned to rock as a thermal mass wall behind my wood stove. It is only about 2 cubic yards of rock, but it really has helped. Last night it was 20 degrees outside, yet I shut the wood stove down at 8 PM and at 5AM this morning, it was still 70 degrees in the house. All that rock absorbs that heat and then releases it back out into the room when the stove has long since gone cold. Granite it won't do much this winter (pun very much intended) when the stove is burning 24/7, but for the dawn and eve of the heating season, it really is working out well.

But as much as I enjoy them too...if you lived closer, I would still very much share them with you! Anyone who loves rocks is a friend of mine.

Thermal Mass by tsj5874, on Flickr

Oh by the way, the implement wheel in the picture...I found that wheel, and another just like it buried in a an old rock wall that I was digging out. Apparently it was a spare parts spot because I found all kinds of spare implement parts, from old harrow teeth to spare discs for disc harrows. I even found a few potato digger bed chains.

Old practice was to fence off field and turn in hogs. A digger bar would be used to punch holes around a stump. Holes were then filled with shelled corn. Hogs would root up stump going after the corn.

Touring 'Upper Canada Village' in Ontario, I saw huge stump pullers, large screws mounted in a tripod w/ a wooden bar for the horse, or more likely oxen to walk around until the stump came up.

Drill a hole down through the stump and add some "stump remover" product to help them break down faster.

quite a place isn't it? saw that stump mover in 1967, looked like a lot of fun!! should tour down there next summer, been a while and would like to see the freemasons hall all fixed up(was once across from the school i attended)

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àigeach carnaid
chaora dhubh
"Don't raise your voice, improve your argument."

cruachan

I have heard about this method a lot, even from family members but I had yet to see it tried. Then a few years ago a neighbor started this method, and I kept my eye on how well it worked.

A year went by, then another, then another until finally this year, his 4th year of using pigs to remove stumps, he hired out an excavator and had them pulled from the ground.

I think it is one of those methods that get a lot of talk, but few people actually try it. I would never call it a non-working method normally, but I saw this method fail on my neighbors place. Its too bad, I clear a lot of land and stumps are my biggest nemesis.

I have never seen one in real life, but I saw a picture of one in and old book regarding the Pilgrims. I would be interested in making my own version of it.

As for the Pilgrims removing stumps and rocks, sometimes it gets me how hard they worked to clear land and it is not appreciated. I was building an access road a few years ago and the NRCS was funding it and they actually told me to go ahead and lay out the road in the field to make it easier to build. I told the conservationist, "My forefathers worked very hard to clear the stumps and rocks from this field and I am not going to haul rocks in where they hauled rocks out of, we are going to build the road in the woods and conserve every square foot of this field." And we did...put the road right over a rock wall making for a very sound road base!

Interestingly enough, we have Amish who are moving in here and are just as dumb as the conservationist...they build their houses right in the center of fields instead of building in the woods. Here we only have 10% of our land mass in fields, the other 90% is in forest so it is imperative to save what little fields we have left!

I tried a can of that. Directions said to age a year, add stuff, age, soak with diesel, burn.

Same stuff?

I thought it was spendy too.

I couldn't agree more with this post. We too often get ourselves in a tizzy trying to remove the stumps when if cut low enough to get over with equipment will rot out in a few years. They return good organic matter to the soild and you don't lose too much grass growth from their size.

I've spent thousands of dollars removing stumps with equipment in the past and it does have it's place. However, unless you're putting in a garden or row crops, you don't need to get that stump out of there imho.

I cut an acre of firewood a year ago and cleared all trees no matter what the species. I left the stumps up tall enough (about 12-18") to be able to see so I don't run over them with my tractor. Wouldn't you know it, I never planted a single sprig or seed of grass but it's covered over in one growing season with awesome bermuda grass sod. If left alone, the natural organic matter that's there in the topsoil will do great. Once you bring in equipment, the soil is disturbed and takes some doing to get it back to the way it was.

Now, that being said, if those pine trees have got the ph of your soil all out of whack from dropping their highly acidic needles for many years, you might end up adding lots of lime to the soil based upon a soil test.

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Francismilker

"The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" James 5:16

I'm not too worried about the condition of the ground at this particular moment. The top soil is rich and black and there is a good bed of clay about 12 inches down that holds the moisture. The timothy grass this past summer even with the heat and drought was shoulder high. Most of the pines have long dropped their dead needles and I don't think they pose a threat other than the one created by them falling randomly.

I have yet to figure out the Amish logic of where they build. Our house is built downhill from the barn. It's like, "HUH? What were you thinking?" When you look at the position of the barn to the house it like, "Why didn't you build the house on the small rise where the barn is and put the barn low so you aren't drain all sorts of nastiness towards the house?" I would think that they would of known better than to have the house to the east of the barn so the prevailing west winds weren't fumigating the house with barn smells. Oh well.

Weather permitting we are going to try to torch one of the stumps this weekend. May not be possible as they are calling for wind gusts up to 30mph.

We are planning to use the pasture for crop grass/garden/orchard so yep, there are areas where the stumps just plain have to go away as deep as we can convince them to go.

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I'm in my own little world, but it's ok. They know me here!

The problem with grinding stumps down is, after a few years, the chips break down, and then the root ball itself breaks down and you end up with a field full of pot holes. You can't bush hog it (which is conducive to good pasture management in certain circumstances) because it is too rough and you risk snapping the legs off your livestock who inadvertently step in them.

It could work however if you have the tractor and a spot where you want to dig out and then fill in the sink holes using that spot. So it can work, and it does look good after you grind them...and grinding only takes a few seconds per stump, just a little post clean up a few years down the road.