Trading freedom for security
I still think it's wrong that
the government took away the ability to use
dynamite from the regular farmer.
If only it were invented 120
years earlier, then perhaps our founding fathers would have included it
somewhere in the 2nd
amendment.
Stump clearing would never be
the same.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Of all the possible book titles, I would never have guessed "farming with dynamite".
The hardest thing about explosives is the experience needed to know the difference between "not quite blowing up a stump" and "blowing up the stump and your house". Some things are best left to experts, and high explosives is one of them. It seems to me that it would be more effective and less dangerous to wind some detcord around a stump or use a shaped charge to break it up than to just dig a hole and throw in a couple of sticks of dynamite!
In my experience, the best way to deal with tree stumps is not to create them! When I was a lad we had to clear some trees from our front lawn. So my Dad phoned a farmer friend of his to pull the trees over with his tractor, after which we could saw them in pieces and fill up the hole. I liked that much better than sawing down the tree and digging out the stump.
But it you have some stumps, a hydraulic cutter like the ones firefighters use to cut people out of cars would probably make short work of any tree root! There are even hand powered ones.