A Yoshino cherry tree growing happily for 10 years in my curbside garden up and died this year – due to the double whammy of beetle infestation and tent caterpillars, I’m told. But wedged as it is into a narrow strip of land between sidewalk and road, with close neighbors including a beautyberry shrub, ornamental grasses and lots of sedum, using a stump-grinder was NOT an option. Even if I weren’t a tightwad.
So I thought in the spirit of research I’d try using the bottle of Bonide Stump-Out that has been sitting in my basement for longer than I remember (from waaay back when I bought products pretty much on faith).
So what IS the stuff? Not that the bottle tells you, or their website, but some sleuthing reveals it’s sodium pyrosulfite, which when mixed with water turns to sodium dioxide, a smelly gas that breaks down lingens in wood to create pockets. Instructions say to pour the stuff into the drilled holes, add water, then wait 4-6 weeks and THEN pour gasoline down the holes. That seeps into those pockets, see? Then wait another 4-6 weeks, pour more gasoline down the holes and then set the whole thing on fire. (I’m not making this up.) The instructions further swear that it doesn’t really create an open flame kind of hazard, though local laws still may prohibit it. Ya think? And only six inches from the sidewalk, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Now a fun thing to do on every known gardening subject is to see what those real gardeners on forums like GardenWeb and DavesGarden have to say, based on their own gardening experiences in various parts of the country. For products and plants both, I love their forums!
And guess what they had to say about Stump-out? No one reported that it worked as claimed, but several people said it definitely doesn’t. Instead, one gardener recommended putting high-nitrogen fertilizer down the holes, and another suggested fresh manure, with mulch on top of it.
So I’ll have to add those to my list of easy stump removal techniques on the website. Then I’ll try something and watch what happens, up-close in this very public spot I pass by every day. I’ll pretend I’m a scientist and report the findings right here.
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I would tarp the neighboring plants and grind away! It ’s been the most effective way to get rid of tree stumps in most all my projects. Of course, when I’m working for others, they don’t want to wait six weeks. They want me to make it go away now!
Let me know how your experiment goes Susan.
Shirley
A close friend of mine has been doing lawn care and landscaping for over a decade and rarely employs a stump grinder. Rather, once the stump is cut flush, they use an axe to cross cut the surface of the wood and break up the stump, cover it with good fresh compost, and finish with a heavy mulching.
It’s not nearly as quick as a stump grinder, but within a year it breaks down enough you can start planting on top of it again. We did this with some thick, well established arborvitae last spring and had a nice garden plot planted over top of it this year.
A stump in my hellstrip between sidewalk and road was left after the city came by, unannounced, and chopped down a horse chestnut tree that’s been slowly dying for the eight years I’ve lived here. There is now a low stump. I don’t think I would ever use anything that required gasoline & fire in my very urban setting. That’s crazy talk. It took eight years to chop it down, I’m sure they’ll be by with a stump grinder before 2016.
Why not just let the stump rot on its own? The stump will break down and fertilize the plants around it over an extended period of time.
Here’s what I did to a sweet gum stump in the middle of our backyard: From Stump to Butterfly Haven.
A couple comments about the posts here:
1. The Stump-out directions do not say to use gasoline. They suggest the use of Kerosene which is much less volatile than gasoline. I am in the process of following the directions on one of my stumps. I will report back with the results.
2. Rotting stumps do not fertilize anything when left to rot. In fact they take nitrogen out of the immediate soil to help breakdown the wood. Much like decomposing saw dust, you add nitrogen to a stump or saw dust to speed the breakdown process.
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