Let me just remove any possible comment of pretentiousness, because I am not that. This project which I call a workout, is what some very hard working people do for a living, day in and day out, with much more efficiency than I have.
A few months ago we hired a company to remove some tall palm trees from out backyard that provided no shade and managed to dump everything right into our pool. It only cost $100 per tree to remove except for the stumps which were cut to as flush to the ground as possible. To remove them would cost $300 a piece because they would have to do by hand. No way to get equipment through the gate. We declined.
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| Here is the start. |
One stump, the closest to our pool was on a raised pile of ground about a foot high, surrounded by rock. I decided to let the grass grow over it and create a little hill. Which it did. The problem became how to mow this mound of rock and stump with without bottoming out the blade on the incline. Couldn't be done. So I decided to take out the stump myself using an eight pound maul and a shovel and using the project as an excuse to work on my ax swinging skills.
I roughed out the work area with help from the former tree's decorative brick border as a guideline. The project dimensions are six feet long, and four feet at the widest. This alone took several hours of maul strikes and shovel work due to the fact that unlike a normal tree stump, a palm tree stump is made up of thousands of fibrous roots. This made work slow going to say the least but provided hours upon hours of swinging away with the eight pound maul just trying to shatter the root system.
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| (good visual of a palm tree root system) |
A decent side view of the stump with a better visual of how high this was off the ground. I had to chop out sections by chopping length wise, then width wise. Then because the fibers snaked all over it wouldn't just pop out. I had to chop at the bottom to get each piece to release it. Somewhere in this horizontal chopping I strained my rib a bit. You can see how the root system just snakes around the center. I suppose a roto tiller would have made this work easier. But where is the workout in that?
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| (Finally making progress) |
At the beginning of Day 4 the end was in sight. Over the first three days I had spent approximately 17 hours chopping and digging. Certainly had I paid the professionals to do it, it would have been significantly faster, probably to better results, but the exercise was incredibly rewarding. The entire stump above ground and four inches below ground has been removed. I also tilled the ground approximately four inches deeper the old fashioned way, hundreds of maul swings to remove more root fibers and break up the ground.
I realized too late that I had removed too much soil, so I had to add top soil to bring up the ground level and level the area out. This involved several five gallon buckets of top soil that I had left over from another project. Bucket carries only added to the final workout. The end result was laying all of two pieces of sod. So much effort for such a small piece of ground. But I am now almost twenty hours of non stop exercise into my week.
I roughed out the work area with help from the former tree's decorative brick border as a guideline. The project dimensions are six feet long, and four feet at the widest. This alone took several hours of maul strikes and shovel work due to the fact that unlike a normal tree stump, a palm tree stump is made up of thousands of fibrous roots. This made work slow going to say the least but provided hours upon hours of swinging away with the eight pound maul just trying to shatter the root system.
A decent side view of the stump with a better visual of how high this was off the ground. I had to chop out sections by chopping length wise, then width wise. Then because the fibers snaked all over it wouldn't just pop out. I had to chop at the bottom to get each piece to release it. Somewhere in this horizontal chopping I strained my rib a bit. You can see how the root system just snakes around the center. I suppose a roto tiller would have made this work easier. But where is the workout in that?
At the beginning of Day 4 the end was in sight. Over the first three days I had spent approximately 17 hours chopping and digging. Certainly had I paid the professionals to do it, it would have been significantly faster, probably to better results, but the exercise was incredibly rewarding. The entire stump above ground and four inches below ground has been removed. I also tilled the ground approximately four inches deeper the old fashioned way, hundreds of maul swings to remove more root fibers and break up the ground.
I realized too late that I had removed too much soil, so I had to add top soil to bring up the ground level and level the area out. This involved several five gallon buckets of top soil that I had left over from another project. Bucket carries only added to the final workout. The end result was laying all of two pieces of sod. So much effort for such a small piece of ground. But I am now almost twenty hours of non stop exercise into my week. 
2 comments:
Satisfaction for a job well done.
I like your blue tarp. Once, while training for Ironman Florida, I hauled two azaela bushes (pretty large root system) across the street on a blue tarp, then planted them in my yard. My neighbor was throwing them away. Great workout.
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