How to Get Free Tree Stumps in Toronto
Wood stumps from healthy trees go for $50 each, upwards to a few hundred dollars on Kijiji, Etsy, through local craftsperson or Wayfair. If you have never moved wood before, it is heavy! Transporting multiple stumps can require some coordination of both muscle and vehicles.
If your urban garden has summer projects that need tree stumps, logs or wood chips then tap into this resource and save yourself hundreds of dollars!
If you’ve somehow ended up here out of curiosity but aren’t sure what you would do with this wood, check out our Pinterest board for some ideas.
Tree rounds are often used for décor, especially in weddings as place settings or chargers, used by photographers as sets or backdrops, by educators as seating and by daycare providers as playground equipment.
Artisans turn them into furniture or sculptures and use them as canvases. Gardeners use them as edging, bug hotels, feature elements or as mulch.
Late winter, early spring in Southern Ontario is tree pruning season. Pruning the tree while it is still dormant keeps the tree from oozing sap and helps to prevent pests and fungi from entering (because they are still dormant too!). Once maple syrup festivals are underway, trees are coming out of dormancy. Maple syrup festivals typically coincide with March Break in Southern Ontario.
In Toronto, construction season never seems to end but it does begin to increase around this time of the year, and construction often disturbs root zones on a tree. The effects of this typically take 2 years to be seen and often spells the end of a trees life.
This is why you will see fences placed around trees when construction is occurring. If the root zones are damaged, the tree will often die and become a safety hazard. So for liability reasons, when the city of Toronto schedules construction, arborists are regularly part of the subcontractors.
What this all means is: the end of February, in the Greater Toronto Area, perfectly healthy trees may be receiving pruning or are being removed (chopped down). We don’t want to import diseases or pests into our garden spaces and we should be selective with what we receive.
How to get free tree stumps?
Ask! If you see an arborist working in your area, strike up a conversation with them.
Politely explain what you are seeking. Provide them with the diameter, thickness/height and the quantity that you are after.
Exchange contact information. Request that they keep an eye out for you while they are in the area working.
You may need to meet them at a job site to collect the wood but they might be willing to do a dump on your driveway. Make sure you clarify this detail at the beginning.
Sit back and wait.
Don’t:
Waste an arborists time.
They are there to work, not chit chat with the neighbourhood. We’re all a little socially deprived after enduring Covid for more then a year, but respect their time and they’ll be more likely to respect your request.
Be unrealistic with expectations.
Free won’t be a perfectly shaped, polished piece. Free won’t be on your timeline. Free comes at a cost, so be realistic with what you are after. Perhaps your schedule and needs would be better suited to finding a local craftsperson that can do holds or delivery.
Request items that you can’t personally lift/move.
Arborists move fast. They won’t wait for you to coordinate extra muscle to help pick up an item from a job site. Their client won’t be impressed if they leave wood behind and don’t do a thorough clean up on the premise that you’ll be picking up from. They are not going to risk their own reputation and schedule to do you a favour.
I’d urge you to avoid foraging for wood in our parks and ravines. I cover foraging in Toronto in detail in another post that you can access here.
We currently have a lot of construction occurring in our neighbourhood and the arborists have been (sadly) dismantling our street trees. We did this “ask” process with UniversalTrees in Toronto and their team was incredibly accommodating!
I explained the project and intent for the wood, provided the range for sizes and gave them my contact info. When they found a tree that fit my request they called me up so I could come and get it. Note: they accommodated me by giving me heads up and meeting my specifications but I had to be ready and available on the fly, to personally pick up. This is the cost of free. No holds. No delivery. But for the size and disease-free criteria, and with just a little effort I saved myself more then $500 with this process.
This request process applies to both wood chips and logs. If you don’t see any arborists in your area, another option for free wood chips and free logs is chipdrop.
The downside to chipdrop is that you cannot make any specific requests. You may get a mix of evergreen and deciduous tree mulch. You may get various sized logs and none match what you are after. You also have no control over the size of the load they dump. But it’s free, and it’s guaranteed to arrive. The arborist you flag in your neighbourhood may not remember or they may not be able to pull through and deliver for you.
To weigh out if chipdrop is right for you check out this:
If you use this process I would love to see what you create with the haul you receive. Tag me on instagram @buying_thyme so I can share some love. Stay tuned for how we utilize these logs in our own kid’s garden.