Category: stump removal

Spending time around the house doesn’t feel right. Even though it’s something I know I’m supposed to do, I get bored quickly. You should see the garden; even though it’s winter, I’ve turned been doing a lot of work. It’s pretty neat, I suppose. People keep stopping in clusters to take a look at it from the street, and this morning I even noticed some people pulling up in a minibus and all piling out. They were taking pictures as well, and now I’m paranoid. Was the formation of seraphim clustered around an exploding star too much of an elaborate hedge formation? Yeah, I probably went a bit far. I’ll have to go out and make it rougher.

That much aside, I do have a new appreciation for contractors around Melbourne, stump grinding is not an easy thing. I found one yesterday, and it was one of my first experiences getting them out of the ground. The last time this happened I was landscaping my workplace and it seemed too easy. Maybe that stump was just a baby, or…I don’t know, a weaker tree. This one was an absolute beast. It became a war of attrition between the stump, with its ally of ground and roots, versus me, with my low-quality pickaxe and eventually my bare hands. I’m seriously going to completely ruin my spine one of these days. Well, I know I don’t, but…

Doesn’t matter, never mind. I now see why extra-special tools are recommended when digging a stump out of the ground. Pro tip for all budding gardeners/tree removal specialists: getting down into the small ditch you’ve dug for yourself. And trying to heave the thing out of the ground with nothing but muscle and willpower is going to give you a new appreciation for the power of nature. I should just stick to tree pruning. Melbourne has people who do that too, so…yeah, I need a new, less dangerous hobby.

-Mack

Being good at everything sucks. I don’t know why it is that I was cursed with this natural ability to do just about anything. You’d think it were a blessing but it has confined me to a private hell. Contrary to what you may think, being good at everything doesn’t put you on top of the world, but instead has the adverse effect of burdening you with the incessant supplications of the common people with whom you are unfortunate enough to be acquainted. I just thank goodness for tree lopping services, Melbourne wide, for saving me from another inconvenience of having to give favours.

You know how perceptive old people are right? They’ll repeat the question they asked you five minutes ago but they’ll pick up on some minor thing you did five years ago retain it with awe-inspiring tenacity. Thus my neighbour, old man Miles, spotted me lopping down a tree in my front yard years ago and it came back to haunt me. The old codger rapped on my door, wanting to know if I could help him out with tree removal at his property across the street. I looked out at the enormous stump he wanted me to get rid of and thought, ‘Am I ever going to get a minute to myself around here?!’

I put my foot down. I feel proud of myself for showing enough spine to say No, demarcating my limits. He was a little dejected but I told him that there are plenty of companies that do stump removal around Melbourne. He was skeptical of prices and efficiency – he wanted as good a job as I had done in my own yard (and who can blame him?) – and I too offered these suggestions not really believing that they’d be the most economical. But hot diggity if I wasn’t wrong about that. The tree removal company came around and removed the stump without leaving so much as a trace of it behind. And the old man sat around grinning on his porch for the rest of the afternoon.