Robot, Half Pint & Scooter: Rob & George vs. The Stumps

So we've been slowly making some changes around the ol' homestead. We'd love to do everything at once but time and money, those two dastardly challengers, keep getting in the way.

But one problem that we knew we wanted to address was our overabundance of stumps. George offered his services to assist me in tackling this problem, even going so far as to say he's somewhat of an expert in the field, as he's done it several times before. I jumped at the chance to take him up on his offer since I've never dug up a stump in my life.

So a couple of Saturday's ago, we decided to give it a go. After running to the lovely Miss Donuts for some early morning fuel, we went to work, thinking that we had a couple of big stumps, and a few small ones that wouldn't be too big of a deal—even hoping to be finished in a few hours.

"HA!" those stumps said, "we'll show you". And they did.

How silly of us to think it might go smoothly. What we found was that these pepper trees have the evil ability to spin a web of roots that stretched in some cases about 15 feet underground. They were crazy. What seemed like a small stump above ground was just a shooter that came off a huge stump under the surface. They were iceberg-like.

We worked from about 9:00 to 5:30 on one Saturday, then from 8:30 to almost 2:00 on another one, but damnit if we didn't show those stumps and roots who is boss. We listened to some good tunes, drank countless ounces of Coke from 7-11 and ate about 48" of Subway sandwiches.

As you can see in the photos, PJ even came out to see if she could help.

Now all Mel and I have to do is decide what to do with the ground, and if we want to try to move the giant Agave plant that sits by the lawn. That my friends will be quite an undertaking.

Above ground this looked small. It turned out to be quite a challenge.