"ameijers" wrote in message
...
People who clear trees
for a living, when they can get away with it, dozer the root balls and
other
chaff into bigass piles, soak with #2, and burn them. Unless you can leave
them sit till weather washes dirt off, chipper guy won't even want to
touch
them- those dirt clods really cut blade life.

That's not completely true. At a local golf course where they cleared some
woods, all of the stumps were taken out with an excavator and placed in a
huge pile. Then some special piece of machinery was brought in that looked
like a 10 foot diameter cylinder, maybe 8-10 feet high. Inside the cylinder
was a giant flail spinning at a high speed. The giant stumps were dropped in
and what came out of this machine was a nice steady stream of rich looking
soil. I think it was less than 30 seconds to reduce a stump of a 18"
diameter tree to 'nothing'.

-al sung