First stump removed

I finally got the first tree stump of the year removed and covered.  Due to all the time spent last year removing tree stumps, I was trying to be better about removing tree stumps this year.    After last year's work I only had three stumps left to remove.   Then the cattle broke off two stumps.  So that made it five stumps.   Then when harrowing the middle pasture I found another stump trying to come out of the ground. That made it six stumps.

I started digging around the stumps earlier this Spring.  And I decided to try not to dig so far down around them.  I figured I would dig down deep enough so that what remained after I burnt them would not rise up out of the ground until I was dead many years from now.

The first three digs went well.  I decided not to dig around the fourth stump as it was soft from decay and maybe a fire on top of it would burn enough of it away.  The fifth stump.  That was a project.  It was big and hard.  I followed a side root and discovered another stump about five feet from the stump I knew about.  And this extra stump was big and hard.  Once I finished digging around them, I decided I was done digging around stumps this year, and the sixth stump would wait for another year to remove.

Now I needed to wait a little bit for the uncovered stumps to dry before trying to burn them.  Before the stumps dried our rains came.  And it rained.  And rained.  A lot.  Then I had to wait for the stumps to dry again.  Then I had to cut hay.  Etc., etc.

I mentioned earlier I let the cattle into the middle pasture where four stumps (three holes) were, and how the cattle were obsessed with rubbing their heads and bodies in the dirt.  So the cattle are now out of the two pastures with the stumps.  This time I decided when using a chainsaw to cut up some branches in a pile I would also trying cutting the tree stumps I had dug.  It kind of worked.  Two stumps I was able to cut off in the holes I had dug.    The other three stumps were hard to cut, and they also had more of a large tap root that wasn't worth cutting as it was hard wood, and one of the stumps had a really large tap root.  That stump may have been from a tamarack tree instead of the usual Spruce trees.

Anyway...  I am still working on burning one stump in another pasture, but today I also spent time filling the dirt back into one of the holes I had cut a stump out of last week.   You'd think this would be easy to do.  Nope.   The cattle had obsessed with rubbing the dirt pile I had created when digging around the stump.  They flattened the dirt pile.  The dirt pile was very wet when the cattle rubbed on it.    The remaining dirt was hardened by the cattle and drying out.  I had to use a shovel and dig the dirt shovel by shovel to loosen it up so I could then shovel the dirt back into the stump hole.  

I finally got it done.  I was doing this along the middle/south pasture fence.  While I was doing the shoveling the cattle were standing along the middle/north pasture fence mooing over and over at me to let them into the middle pasture.  I didn't.

This was the stump I found trying to rise out of the ground.  You can see it in the middle of the photo.

Ok.  Not so big or bad of a stump.   And this is the dirt pile the cattle later rubbed against and flattened.

After I chainsawed the stump.

All done.