Last weekend's house project

The idea was to get this tree out before any birds decide to nest it in.  Plus, this time of year, it should be easy with the soft ground...

Taking this tree out was a little more work than I expected.  I figured I could just dig around and cut roots, but one root I found was probably 9" in diameter!  I did dig around and cut as many roots as I could, making sure that by taking the stump out, I wasn't going to break a pipe of some sort or another.  Sure enough, in my digging, I found two storm drain pipes with outlets buried in mud and ground cover.  It's hard to say where they come from, but it's easy to enough to clean them up and make sure they drain well.

So, after loosening the stump as much as I could, I hooked it up to the FUNTRD, put the truck in 4-lo, locked the rear diff, and gave it a few good pulls... out it came, tearing apart that giant root.  That was fun.

Yes, I know, I should have had a fiber roll along the perimeter and inlet protection at the downstream catch basin... but I was careful not to get too much mud in the gutter.  Plus, the NPDES General Permit doesn't apply to projects of only 10 square feet... yet...