I had a beautiful blue spruce in the backyard that was about 20 feet tall – the prefect Christmas tree to hang lights on. But about a month ago the tree starting turning brown fast. We had a tree expert come out to take a look and he said the IPS Beatle got to it and it needed to be removed ASAP.
So I removed the tree myself (DIY) and placed it in the front yard, then started to dig the tree stump up with a shovel. After about an hour of digging, I could tell this was going to take a very long time! And the hole in the ground was going to need to be a lot bigger!
So I gave up and had the tree expert come out and remove the stump and the tree for $150. If I was to do the stump myself I am sure it would have taken 6 to 8 hours to remove it with a shovel, so the $150 was worth it. I was amazed how large those roots were.
The tree expert used a neat tool called a Vermeer SC252 which is much smaller than a skid steer loader and a track excavator back-hoe. A small hack-hoe would have caused much more stress to the grass. I am sure you can rent this type of equipment at a local rental store. As you can see in the stump removal video you grind away the stump just a little at a time. The whole process takes about an hour.
What is so great about this method verse digging it out with a hack-hoe is it leaves you with great mulch for the next tree you plant in its place.
So skip the shovel and use the right rental equipment.
Below is the new tree we replaced it with after the stump was removed.
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[...] I had a tree die in my backyard so I cut it down and hauled it away. But the tree stump was too much for me to dig out so I hired someone to grind the stump out for me. I noticed that Tim had done a video on tree stump removal recently and ranked really well for it within 24 hours of posting it. So the idea came to me to test if I could out rank him with a similar tree stump removal video. [...]