Tree stump 1 removal

I spent parts of the last so many days removing the tree stump I found in the middle pasture last year.  I figured this wouldn't be a big job as the stump was one that I had burnt many years ago.  15 years or more?  And who knows how long the stump was a stump and not a live tree?  But I found out this stump was from when I first started burning tree stumps.  In the beginning I wouldn't dig much around the stumps thinking that the burn would keep going down into the ground.  Well, it doesn't really.  Maybe the stump will burn a little below ground level.  Back then I thought that was ok.  Since then I learned that the stumps will slowly be squeezed up out of the ground a little bit.  And that is what happened with this stump.

I found out this stump was for a full blown larch tree.  It is hard to get larch to start burning.  And does larch really decay?  I wonder.   This stump's roots were mostly rock hard solid even after decades after the tree died.

So it took me a number of days to dig around this stump.  Since I didn't expect the stump to be large I tossed the dirt a short distance away.  Of course I then found out as I dug the tree stump had sections under the dirt I just tossed and I had to then moved that dirt over.  And after more digging, move over the dirt pile a bit more.

The stump was large, but had multiple almost independent sections of roots that went down and sideways.  To make burning go better and not have this stump show up again this meant digging around the tree root sections.  To get around the roots and make digging easier I ended up using an axe to remove tree root sections.  It got to a point that it was better to chop out the stump sections than burning them.

I got all stump roots chopped except for two sections.  By now it was pointless to go through all the work to bring in branches for a fire.  So I got my chainsaw and cut the final two sections.  One section was a decent size.  The section's wood was rock hard.  No decay there.  It took some effort to chainsaw through it.  Then I had to sharpen my chainsaw's chain as the wood was so hard it had an effect on the chain.

But I'm done.  The stump is gone and the hole is filled back in.

What I thought the tree stump originally was.

The pieces I chopped out from what I thought the stump originally was.

Look, I found more of the tree stump.

I had removed some of the extra stump sections.

Ever after all these many years, there is still sap in one of the stump's root sections.

I had to chainsaw these root sections to remove them.

Very hard wood

All gone.

All done.  There were more stump root sections than what is seen. I had already hauled off over half of them.