Anyone who has pulled a few stumps already knows it: the hard part isn't the stump. It's everything around it, and it's almost never easy to reach. The stump sits in the back garden of a house, with buildings all around, and the only way in is a side passage as wide as a doorway. Or it's past a pedestrian gate, at the end of a path between two walls, on a lawn that must not be turned into a bog. And in the end, whatever happens, there are three hundred kilos of wood and soil to carry out along the same route you came in by.
When the stump really has to go, there are two roads. They have been known forever and there is nothing to invent: what changes the job is what you reach it with and how you carry the material away.
(Flush cutting with devitalisation is not removal: the stump stays in the ground, and it only works if you never have to touch that area again.)
The two roads
Stump grinding
The grinder eats the stump a few centimetres below ground level and reduces it to chips. You don't need a heavy machine and the surrounding soil isn't disturbed: it's the only choice when pipes, cables or an irrigation system run underneath, and when the lawn has to stay exactly as you found it.
The limit is precise: the grinder removes the stump, not the roots. Those stay in the ground and rot over the years. For a lawn or a flower bed it is perfectly fine. Under paving or a foundation it is not: when the wood gives way, the soil settles and it shows on the surface.
You are then left with the pile of chips to dispose of, which is bulkier than it looks.
Digging and extraction
You dig around it, cut the main roots and lift the whole stump out with its root system. It is the definitive solution: nothing is left underneath, and the ground can be paved or replanted straight away.
It costs more in time and in disruption. You need room to work around the plant, a hole is left to fill, and you have to allow for restoring what is around it — lawn, kerbing, irrigation.
It is the only road when the stump is large, when the root system is wide, or when something that cannot settle has to go on top.
How you choose, in practice
Three questions, in this order.
What has to go there afterwards? If it's paving, a foundation or a new tree, you dig and extract. If it's lawn or a flower bed, grinding is enough and costs less.
What is underneath? Before you run anything, you check for services and systems. A cut irrigation pipe costs more than the whole job.
How do you get there? It's the question usually asked last, and it's the one that decides the day. If the way in is a pedestrian gate or a path between two walls, the big machine won't fit, and without a machine you're back to spade and pick.
The part nobody talks about: carrying the material away
A medium-sized stump, with the soil still on it, weighs as much as three or four people. The roots won't fit in a wheelbarrow. And after the stump come the branches, the grinder chips, the spoil.
This is where a clean day turns into a long one: you take the stump out in an hour and spend the afternoon carrying it out by hand.
A compact tracked machine solves exactly this part, and for three reasons that have nothing to do with the stump:
- it goes where a person with a wheelbarrow goes — the side passage of the house and the pedestrian gate stop being the limit of the job;
- the tracks spread the weight, so you can drive onto a wet lawn or freshly worked ground without leaving the ruts you'd otherwise have to redo;
- it holds the slope, where a wheeled machine starts to slip just when it's loaded.
One machine, the attachment does the changing
On multifunction machines the attachment unclips and changes on site, without going back to the workshop. For a stump removal job two attachments matter:
The stump grinder, which eats the stump below ground level, fits on the CMF1200 and CMF1500 in the SP3 version.
The grapple, for picking up logs and brush and loading them, fits on the C85-ML and on all the CMF with ML, in the SP2 and SP3 versions.
The same machine goes in, grinds or extracts, loads, carries and unloads. Nobody handles anything by hand, and above all nobody makes twenty trips up the side passage with a wheelbarrow.
Before you start, four things
- Check the underground services. Always, even in a garden you know.
- Decide where the stump goes before you pull it out. If you don't know where it's going, it sits in the middle of the site for a week.
- Measure the narrowest passage, not the main entrance. That's what decides which machine you can use.
- Look at the ground the day before. On a soaked lawn, a wheeled machine does more damage than the stump.
In short
The right technique depends on what has to go there afterwards and on what is underneath. But the time of a stump removal is almost always set by access and by carrying the material away, not by the cut.
Cormidi machines are built for this: tracked, narrow, made to get in where others stop and to carry the load out without wrecking what's around it.
