Our garden had 38 mature trees and a pile of rhododendron bushes removed 5 years ago by previous owners.
They didn’t remove any stumps at all.
I have done 8 so far and fed up, of digging big holes,and hacking out roots.
Any tips for doing it faster?

hire a stump grinder… ’bout £110ish a day… that or dynamite. or you could add it into one of your outdoor ed programs

Stump grinder?

Think three dimensionally. Don’t remove the stumps, just pile more top soil on until it’s deep enough and level.

Digging and hacking is the best way. I found the best way to do the hacking was with a sabre saw. You can plunge it into the soil and cut the root with very little digging. It’ll get through a few blades but they are cheap.

Stump grinder+ a million

I want to google “stump grinder” but I’m afraid of what images might come up. It sounds like a VERY niche fetish. 😳

seems to be a safe enough search, no nasties returned in images or vids.

Damn, Drac beat me to it! Two minds, etc… 😀

Oof, blowing up things….ace 8)

I could get a grinder in for a couple of the bigger ones – to add hassle, most of them are on a steep slope, and the ground level has been raised by 20-50cm around them….The stump grinder I used before really only took them down to ground level, and a good few really do need digging out so we can plant things.
Oh well, one per night and keep going…

I got a local franchise of stumpbusters to do mine, had 5 or 6 decent sized sycamores to do, they ground down to 14 inches below the surface, and you end up with nice, wood chip enriched soil. IIRC it was about £150, bit that was about 5 years ago.

digging bars, good gloves, a VERY big screwdriver and a small handheld jigsaw (sort of dig down around stump and dig/saw out routes on way so you can dig/get depth and when a spade deep use screwdriver to poke out soil under stump and scoop out (gloves) so you can get a cut with the jigsaw at the roots directly under the stump that you can’t dig), elbow grease required as well.

My experiment – spade/high power hose/jigsaw, was only partly successfull – by blasting around roots you could see the problems but it made the ground too wet and hideously messy and I decided using a partly submerged electric jigsaw may have limitations as a good idea.

Our current house is in a road next to Orchard Way ………………..

I’ve got 35m of stumps of various unspecified species left after cutting down the former owners Harlequin style hedge. I’m going for the mini digger option.

Reading this suddenly reminded me of Blaster Bates: [video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOwven0Rt94&sns=em[/video]
Probably NSFW. 😉

Stumpgrinders are hard work and only beneficial if you’re talking big diameters. Hack/dig sounds bestin youf case. An axe, folding hand saw and spade will get it done.

US Forest Service Manual calls for blasting. 😯 The manual is from 1935 though… 😉

Six down…..

You could just try a mattock. Makes light work of roots compared to a spade/pole/saws. Apart from the mini digger idea they all sound like much harder work than with a mattock.