Rebuilding Stump Ground Soil

hey guys Tara here with force farm project today we are going to talk about cleaning up where a stump has recently been ground and trying to get that soil back to where grass will grow any [Music] [Applause] [Music] so as you can see we've got a pile of mulch here I'm going to take you to the backyard here and show you this massive pile of mulch that was all in this stump hole that that's been ground up and we had to take this tree down the other day because it had a rotten spot in it and good thing we did there was a huge hole in the middle of it we're lucky it didn't fall you see this little bit of dirt here that is all we got compared to the large amount of mulch that was in there woodchips and whatnot and those woodchips take time to break down and they just draw the nitrogen out of the soil well most plants need all that I know need nitrogen to grow so with that being in the soil you're gonna have a really hard time getting grass to grow here for a while lime would really help getting the woodchips out of there is ideal but you can see look here Brian up close you can see there is still tons of little wood shavings like looks like sawdust from that grinder that's still in there so you still have the issue of wood breaking down but obviously much less when you get this massive stuff out of it so a couple of things we do to get this stuff out of here we're down to the last little bit here I didn't want to bore you with eight hours of literally eight hours of going through here and getting these woodchips out but we'll take this thing here if it's when they get done grinding this stuff will all be packed down hard because these ran over it with that grinder and whatnot and I'll chop at it and do this number and get it spread out and we have this screen that we've been literally sifting it through and coming out with good clean dirt you don't have to get it that clean the cleaner you get it the less problem you're gonna have with a loss of nitrogen as it decays but you can take either a leaf rake or a garden rake and you can literally just rake it cross it and start pulling all these woodchips out and I would rather lose some dirt to get them woodchips out of there then I would try to save the dirt and you can do a lot just like that sometimes the stuff is a little clumpy you might want to grab a garden rake because it's stiffer and chop at it and break up a little bit and then start pulling and again you can get more stuff out it'll dig a little better one thing to note is you can see this stuff's kind of like sand it just falls apart really easy one day of rain and this is going to be nothing but a muddy sticky mess the woods gonna stay in there unless you fight with it after that so we're out here trying to get this done because tomorrow morning is supposed to start raining about two o'clock possibly all day or most of it so we're about done let me show you how our little sifter thing works four pieces of treated 2x4 I don't know it might be 20 inches by maybe close to 30 inches long quarter inch grid screen galvanized this is some aluminum on the side that I strapped over the bottom of that screen which holds it together better god that did heating an air gave that to me I built this 30 years ago when my nephew had to do a report on gold mining and I took him out and we did some gold mining they bought a gold pan and we use this and we sifted through rocks in the creeks and stuff and have been using it ever since for various things but anyway it works great for this doesn't cost much to build if you really want to clean it up and you really want to put a lot of back work into it I'll just do that number right there and just push that dirt around again this has not been rained on yet this is freshly ground a couple days ago it's still damp so it's not dusty I hadn't had time to dry out and it hadn't got rained on so it's not sticky and wet so it's the perfect condition to be doing this I'm not getting any dust and it's not muddy just do that and then throw it out of there and get you another shovel full so I'm gonna go ahead and finish cleaning this up and then I'm gonna bring you back and show you what we're gonna do to try and help get these woodchips to break down and get it to our grass will grow here sooner because it can take a couple of years I've had people tell me their stumps sat there for 3 4 5 years before they good growth of grass I had 34 white pines on my property that were huge in first year we had grass but I spent weeks sifting that stuff out with this I'm a determined individual you gotta want it alright first we're gonna put a little bit of this dirt in these holes nothing fancy and then if you get some of this grass in here nitrogen in that grass should help break down all those little solid US sized particles of wood plus it adds a little organic matter to the soil make the worms happy they'll come in there they'll probably eat some of the wood chips throw a little more dirt we'll be ready for the next round well just layer this a few times like this and might seem like a little bit overkill but I would like to have some grass growing here eventually like I said I've had people tell me it took five or six years because they left his stuff there this tree stump was a little over three foot diameter when we cut it off a little over foot above the ground when it went down to the ground it was over four feet and there was roots that big going off into the ground in different directions so pretty big hole here I guess this thing's twelve feet by eight or ten feet maybe we're not gonna have enough dirt to fill this hole in but luckily we have 20 acres nearby we'll bring some topsoil in as we need it so what we're going to do is keep spreading this pile of dirt over top of this hole here and there's the deepest part and then we're gonna top it off with our topsoil which will have all these woodchips so that'll help tremendously but once we get that move then we'll start moving that dirt over here and fill this party in well ideally I would have thrown a little bit of lime down on here on each level and we're gonna do several layers of this until we get all this dirt spread out and once we put topsoil on it won't have all these little wood chips so it won't have the demand for nitrogen like this soil does that was here from this stone so I was thrown a little lime down and probably a little bit of starter fertilizer on each level it's got a lot of nitrogen in it and that would help break those wood particles and chips down as well but we didn't have it and we're not doing it when we put our topsoil on top of here we're gonna seat it at that time we're gonna line the whole front yard and we'll probably throw a little starter fertilizer down something I don't normally do but we're going to try and get this restored so this one time we will do it hope this helps some of you out check back soon we'll have more tips like this coming in the future have a good one

Channel: Forest To Farm

Views: 15,591

Rating: 4.8235292 out of 5

Keywords: forest to farm, foresttofarm, farm, farming, farmlife, farm life, homestead, homesteading, homesteadlife, homestead life, garden, gardening, stump grinding, mulch, back to eden, back to eden gardening, compost, soil health, soil health tips, improving soil, improving soil health, permaculture, natural gardening, organic gardening, grinding a stump

Id: qkjwFa5dHbY

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019