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
<mailto: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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