North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Louis Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

Jerry, 
Nitrogen is the 'rate-limiting factor' in the decomposition of woody materials - that's why you need 'greens' in a compost pile to facilitate breakdown of the 'browns'.  So...provision of nitrogen - whether in the form of fresh manure, or nitrogen-based fertilizers, like ammonium nitrate or urea, will speed up breakdown of the woody material in the stump.  I've seen the Amish back up a manure spreader to oak/hickory stumps in recently cleared/cutover land and bury the stump under a pile of fresh cow/horse manure.  Within a couple of years, most have rotted sufficiently that they can hook a team of horses to them and pop them right out.

I'm a proponent of targeted use of chemical herbicides - I'd use either full-strngth (not the diluted, ready-to-use stuff) glyphosate(Roundup, Kleenup, etc.), applied directly to freshly exposed cambium tissue, or one of the 2,4-D/triclopyr formulations, like Brush-B-Gon - again, applied directly to a fresh cut exposing cambium all the way around the stump.

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 7:51 AM, <jerrydana5@aol.com> wrote:

I have two questions:

1.  I have a stump from a Sassafras tree I cut down in the middle of the yard.  Does anybody know of something I can put on it to "dissolve" or make the stump soft so I can chop it out?

2.  I have a couple of shrubs which in my garden I've been cutting back in hopes of killing them and it hasn't worked.  The roots are very deep and I cannot dig them out.  Is there something I can put on them to kill them?   I eventually want to use the soil so don't want to put anything on it that will render the soil useless. 

 

Jerry in southern Indiana

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