The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Trading freedom for security

Spud bar instead of dynamite


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.



Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

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.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.


If you had dynamite and used it on the stumps, you would then have a bunch of holes to fill.
Comment by zimmy Wed Apr 28 19:59:18 2010
Yes, please talk him out of it! I like all of his limbs intact. :-)
Comment by anna Wed Apr 28 20:07:47 2010

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.

Comment by Roland_Smith Wed Apr 28 20:33:15 2010





profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.