The one tool I never expected to buy was a pick axe.

We are currently engaged in removing a series of ugly bushes from the front of our front garden, ugly bushes which are partially blocking the walkway, although the main reason we are doing it is just because they are ugly.

Hacking the branches off the first two was easy enough, with new loppers Jen bought this year performing in an exemplary way as the canopies thinned and the pile of branches grew. However, removing the trunks is much harder.

I have dug out bushes before. I hauled out an inconveniently positioned privet bush at the house in Frimley with nothing but a hatchet and a hand trowel. I was told that privet was difficult to remove, but it was as nothing to the massive juniper bush I have been fighting with today.

The fact that the soil at the front of our house is so poor and so compacted adds to the difficulty: I learned that using a shovel to break up the soil around the bush is infeasible because of the roots embedded in it; and the garden fork was not equal to the task since the multiple tines just got snarled up. I was picking out tiny amounts of soil with the hand trowel and then hacking at the roots with an axe - basically a rerun of the privet bush situation, but with a much larger bush to haul out.

And so I trolled down to our local DIY store to buy a pick axe and a whetstone for the axe.

The pick axe was like magic, breaking up the soil into shovelable lumps in a fraction of the time it had taken me to dig out before. It also helped in finding buried roots since it was much more precise than the fork.

Then a neighbour swung by to offer a saw and some advice on using loppers for the roots rather than the axe. I don't know why I had not thought of that before, but the approach helped a great deal.

So, the juniper trunk is still not moving, but it has a number of large roots no longer supporting it. With any luck another couple of evenings will see it gone.

I can really appreciate why some folks haul tree stumps out of the ground with winches, though, not to mention the idea of blasting it with some explosive.

I'm exhausted now. Time to go to sleep.

Posted by Dunx at July 6, 2008 08:52 PM