Tools for uprooting stumps of shrubs and trees.

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Mycrossover

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I cut down a Big shrub with loppers and chainsaw and am now left with a stump of stubbs that must be a couple of feet across. I have attacked it with a shovel, cut big roots with the loppers but I am not making good progress. I went online and see suggestions to use a sawzall with a pruning blade, a mattock or a tramper. Before buying any of these tools I thought I would check with the experts. The smaller tampers are a 4 ft, 12lb steel bar with a 3" blade on the end. The bigger ones are around 68" at 16lbs. Tampers can cut and lever the stump. The well reviewed one from HD and others is only available online I have no experience with a mattock either. Somehow I have never owned a sawzall but spending a 100 bucks for the base model Milwaukee for a job that it may not do well or be damaged by dirt and hoping I can find other uses for it does not appeal. Any advice appreciated. Thanks.

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Do you have vehicle access? If you do you can wrap a chain around the stump and pull it out. A little messy but has always worked for me.


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If you own some hogs you can use them to dig it out. Take a crowbar and put some holes around the stump and fill them with cracked corn. The pigs will dig the corn out of the ground and eventually dig up your stump. You can also do this with chickens but they work a bit slower.
 
If you own some hogs you can use them to dig it out. Take a crowbar and put some holes around the stump and fill them with cracked corn. The pigs will dig the corn out of the ground and eventually dig up your stump. You can also do this with chickens but they work a bit slower.
In suburban NJ rooting pigs are not too common but I like your idea, and the chickens, too. LOL!! I have a small pry bar and with a dead blow hammer it goes pretty easy into the root ball in spite of the bar being short, curved and narrow. It looks like the 48" Bully tamper with a 3" wide blade would make short work of it. The ball already rocks with a shovel under it. I can definitely get it this way or get the bigger bar for faster removal. I thought of pulling it out with my truck but I am near a lot of other stuff and don't want to create new problems. Thanks all for your innovative suggestions. The reviews if the bar have numerous success stories of easy root removal and failures with a sawzall. The bar should be good for ice, too. The Farmer's Almanac is predicting a bad winter.

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As Archimedes once said “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it and I shall move the world”. If you have a plethora of porcupines, you can pour bacon grease on it and they will literally eat it out of the ground. You could also use dynamite but suburban NJ you might get a noise complaint or maybe you won’t. All else fails, HD does usually rent small stump grinders which should make short work of it.
 
Hooray!! I got the #/%=÷ stump out. I found that most of the roots are horizontal and the big tap root i was expecting to find was not there. I kept digging under it. A more effective approach would have been to buy a big tamper ( pole axe) and go straight down all the way around the stump. There were no big horizontal roots that were buried that deep. THEN Archemedes' observation kicks in and the almost 6 ft bar levers it out. The stump was next to my garage. No dynamite. HF has one of those 17lb tampers for around 20 bucks, with a coupon.

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