How the Bonide Stump-Out Changed My Weekend Brush Clearing

When I bought the 22 acres outside Crossville back in 2019, I knew the back fence line was going to be a project. Six years of privet, blackberry bramble, sweetgum saplings and old cedar had swallowed the whole stretch, and the fence itself had collapsed under the weight. What I didn't figure on was how much of the job would be fighting the stumps after the brush was down.

I'm Dale Kittredge, retired county road-crew foreman, and I've been clearing that ground in sections ever since. I've got an older compact utility tractor and a pickup, and over the years I've cut down plenty of stuff. But cutting a sweetgum off at the base doesn't end the fight. Within a couple of weeks you've got sprouts ringing the stump, and by the next year you've got a new thicket that's thicker than the one you cut.

A neighbor told me about Bonide Stump-Out Stump & Vine Killer. He'd used it on a line of stumps along his driveway and said it was the only thing that kept the regrowth down. I picked up the 8 ounce bottle with the applicator and figured I'd test it on the worst stretch of the fence line.

The way I used it was about as simple as it gets. After I cut a stump down to a few inches, I applied the concentrate straight out of the applicator onto the cut surface. The label says to use it undiluted on stumps, and that's exactly what I did. No mixing, no sprayer to drag through the brush, no measuring.

The Bonide Stump-Out is a liquid concentrate, 8 fluid ounces, and it's labeled for stumps, woody plants, vines and broadleaf weeds. The active ingredient is 3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridinyloxyacetic acid, which is a mouthful, but what it does on a fresh cut is stop the stump and roots from sprouting. The label says to expect results in one to six weeks.

I'll be honest, I was skeptical. I've seen a lot of products promise to kill stumps and then watched the sprouts come back the next spring. So I treated about half the stumps along that fence line and left the other half untreated, just to see if the Bonide was actually doing anything or if I was fooling myself.

The stumps I treated stayed quiet all summer. The ones I skipped were sprouting again by week three.

The results showed up over the next several weeks. The treated stumps dried out and the bark started to pull away from the wood, and not one of them threw a sprout. The untreated ones, on the other hand, had green shoots coming up around the edges by the third week. That was enough proof for me, and I went back and treated the ones I'd skipped.

A few things I learned along the way. Cut the stump low before you treat it, because the lower you cut, the less stump you have to look at and the easier it is to cover the whole cut surface. Treat it the same day you cut it, while the cut is still fresh, and work the concentrate into the outer ring of the cut, right inside the bark. That's where the sprouts come from.

I also learned what this product is not. It's a stump killer, not a stump remover. The stump stays in the ground and rots on its own schedule, which is fine by me because I'm not trying to plant a garden in that fence line. And it's labeled for outdoor use around homes, cabins, fences and walkways, so I kept it to the brush and the fence line and didn't use it anywhere near the vegetable garden.

One more thing worth saying: read the label and follow it. The Bonide Stump-Out is a concentrate, and the directions tell you how to use it for stumps versus how to use it as a foliar spray with a hose-end or tank sprayer for woody plants and vines. I used it the way the label said, and it worked. That's not a complicated system, but it's the one that works.

For the record, I'm not telling you this product will clear a whole acre for you. It won't. On the big stuff, the cedars that were too far gone and the trees I couldn't handle with my tractor, I called in a guy with a skid steer, and that was money well spent. But for the day-to-day work of keeping a fence line open and keeping cut stumps from resprouting, this is the tool I reach for now.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee, here's what I'd tell you. Clearing brush is mostly grunt work, and the stump is the part that keeps coming back to haunt you. A bottle of Bonide Stump-Out with the applicator is cheap insurance against doing the same job twice. Cut it, treat it the same day, and move on to the next one. And if you're looking at something bigger than you can handle with a tractor and a chainsaw, don't be proud. Call somebody with the right equipment. There's no shame in renting a skid steer or hiring a pro, and there's a lot of wasted weekends in trying to do it all yourself.