I tried hooking a battery across the stump and nothing happened. There, you have the obligatory electronics design part.
Now, last year I had to take some rather large Doug Fir trees out around the property, leaving the stumps behind. The snowplow must have found each and every one last winter and did a hard-stop each time with the concomitant hard-stop to the operator (me).
I've been told that tree stumps will decay on their own in ten years or so. That's way too long for me. I'd like to find a way of "inducing" rot cheaply and easily.
One thought was to bore a moderately large (30-40mm) hole in the stump and fill it with some relatively harsh chemistry. Say, H2SO4 (battery acid from Auto Zone). HCl (Muriatic acid from Home Depot). NaOH (lye from the supermarket). Or is there actually a product made for this purpose (Stump Rot Juice)?
Filling the hole with gasoline, letting it soak in, and igniting isn't really a good idea with as much native fuel as there is around here. Too many neighbors and too close to windows to use the old nitrate fertilizer and diesel "blow it to smithereens" trick.
Anybody got either a suggestion or a pointer where this question might be more properly addressed?
Years ago we had to take out some huge elms that succumbed to Dutch Elm disease. We tried a variety of magic potions poured into holes bored in the stumps. After a few years of waiting for results - and seeing very little - we resorted to mechanical methods.
There may be some new magic on the market now, but cellulose is remarkably resistant to acids, bases, and biological decay.
Can you just get out the chain saw and cut 'em off right at ground level?
Or rent one of those stump grinder things for a day.
I heard somewhere of seeding (sporing?) your stumps with mushrooms to increase the decay rate. Googling "mushrooms and stump removal" got me several hits.
I've felled several big trees in the past. I dug out the stumps of the last three, here (you do NOT want to do this if the stump is large -- last one was almost a ton!).
I've tried "stump rotters" in the past and found them ineffective. Perhaps it depends on the variety of tree, moisture content of the soil, etc.?
If you can rent a stump grinder and are not a klutz (lest you risk losing various anatomy parts!) this can quickly bring a stump down to grade level or slightly below.
The others I resorted to burning out. But, not with as potent an accelerant as you suggested! :>
Cut the stump down as close to ground level as possible. Note that if you remove some of the dirt around the perimeter of the stump, you can get the body of a chainsaw *below* grade and, thus, get the bar down *to* grade level. Be wary of the gas tank's location :>
Drill the top of the stump with a *lot* of large holes as deep as you can -- before your arms tire. I used a 1.5" bit in a 10A drill to make short work of this.
Remove all "natural fuel" from the area. Bring a garden hose to the site and a fire extinguisher (if you have one -- I keep a pair of them in the garage adjacent to the kitchen entrance).
Soak the top of the stump in lighter fluid. Cover the stump with a mound of charcoal briquettes (they burn more readily than the stump esp if the wood is still green). Soak them with lighter fluid.
WAIT for fluid to soak in/evaporate so you don't get a large flare up on ignition.
You'll need to *actively* attend to this for much of the day. You can add briquettes as they are consumed. Much of the initial action is to dry out the stump so that burning is practical.
Before leaving the stump (for the day), soak it with water from the garden hose to be sure it is cool and not a fire threat.
A day or two later, mechanically remove as much of the charred and "healthy" wood as possible to assess how much progress you have made. If you are comfortable swinging an axe at the ground, that will work. You can also use a trenching tool. I use a
40 lb "caliche bar" (5 ft long bar with a 4" wide "chisel" tip that you thrust downward -- intended for "cutting soil"). The point is to have something with sufficient mass available.
I had to repeat this process three times (three bags of charcoal) for an 18" stump before it was diminished enough that it could be covered with soil. It took many years for the remaining portion of the stump to disintegrate below grade -- I would have to add soil to the area yearly as the ground would subside as more of the stump (and root system) would decay.
Digging out the stump (and roots) is a far more labor intensive task. But, if you want to plant something in exactly the same place, it is the only recourse you may have :-/ If you go that route, be sure you know what's *in* the ground proximate to the stump. And, plan on having a friend with a powerful winch to drag the exposed stump/roots out of the hole once exposed. Along with a fair amount of soil to replace the "missing mass" (the last one I removed required 7 tons of additional soil to restore the ground to its prior level -- *after* I had returned the other soil to the hole!)
An exercise in creative has people come up with ideas no matter how silly. Here's my silly ideas..
Giant drill bit. Termites Giant belt sander. Pound it in. Pile driver. Giant hammer. Tie 2 stumps together and use winch to yank out. Raise the ground around. Bury the stumps. Use excavator to dig it out. Use jack hammer to splinter it. Drill lots of holes in stump for faster natural decomposition. Ablate it with water jet. Ablate with machine gun. Get artistic with a chainsaw. Leave property. Type 'tree stump remover' in Google images. There's some heavy duty gizmos.
There are products you can buy that make a quick job of it but I haven't tried any because our stumps are not in the way:
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Just keep in mind that the rotting process won't know when to stop. So it'll creep into the big roots and then, one sunny winter day, your wife may find you laying next to the snow plow with one of its front wheels deep into a sinkhole.
Alternatively, you might hire a group of termites. But make sure they agree to leave once all stumps are eaten up, that any wood with a manufacturer's stamp or paint on there is off limits, and also that they do not form a union :-)
What I've done here in Arizona, albeit a dry climate which helps... dig around the stump, fill with charcoal, light 'er up, smolders for weeks, but gradually gets below ground level.
However, if you live in a weenie state, you may be arrested for unlawful burning ;-) ...Jim Thompson
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I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
How about I was hoping to find somebody who had been there, done that. I did the google search and came up with a few "tree rot" products but just as many folks who say those products are hokum.
We have a lot of clay in the soil, here. It is (inaccurately) referred to as caliche perhaps because it *acts* like rock! :>
The wide, sharp blade is invaluable for "cutting" chunks of soil out of the ground (which literally resemble *bricks* when stacked alongside the hole you're digging!)
This one is shorter. Curiously enough, has a large, 4 in dia flat spot on the *non-business* end which I can only assume is intended as a striking surface (!). Though the idea of hefting a sledge hammer that high in the air to be *able* to strike that surface intimidates me! :>
While a wonderfully effective tool, it invariably leaves me with huge blisters on my hands *while* using it! No doubt because it is almost impossible to keep a good grip on it (esp once your hands tire and perspire) and it ends up "slipping" across the skin of the palms (takes two hands to handle :> ).
One of these days I will learn to wear *gloves*...
Been there and done that. Cut as much off as you can with a chain saw. Then either use the tip of the chain saw blade to cut grooves in the top, or use a drill to drill fairly deep ( 4 to 6 inchis ) holes. Lots of holes or grooves. Go to the feed store and buy some nitrogen fertilizer. Sodium Nitrate, Potassium Nitrate, Ammonium Nitrate. Fill the holes with the fertilizer and wet with water. Repeat filling the holes with fertilizer and water when ever you remember to do it.
The nitrogen will speed up the rotting, but it will still take time. They will not rot quickly in cold weather. They are not likely to be gone by the first snow, so buy some of those flags people use to mark driveways and mark the stumps so you do not hit them this winter. By next winter the stumps should be fairly rotten.
45-0-0 urea fertilizer (without diesel fuel and detonator) does accelerate rotting, but it won't be gone before winter. You want (many) more than one hole, since you have "rather large" stumps.
If you can dump a load of chicken manure (smellier but more effective) or horse manure (not as stinly, can be used to cover the chicken if you get that) over the top of the whole thing (enough that no stump shows), that also helps the rotting by keeping a nice moist environment and supplying a bit more nitrogen. For less urgent stumps, that in itself is sufficient. Combined with the fertilizer, it will help speed things up.
The only quick way I know of (other than fire and explosives, which you've eliminated) involves large machinery. The good quick way involves digging out and removing the whole stump, then filling the hole, once. The bad quick way involves a stump grinder and then you have to fill in the sink hole (several times, normally) when the roots do rot.
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