Last year I had quite a few trees removed and the arborist also got most of the stumps...but I had 4-5 left I intended to get to this year.  One of them was left maybe 18" tall and I didn't know why but had never looked at it closely. Today I did (prepping for my plan to rent a stump grinder next week and get 'er done).   He left it that high because it had a 1/4" piece of steel rod stuck in it, it exited the truck just below where he cut it off. I cut around the stump and the rod to make it shorter and also hoping to get it to where I could get that rod out...no luck. I think it's a 36" piece that's sold as electric fence supports...for some reason the guy who built the house put these things all over the place, and in this case the tree (an Aborvitae) grew around it. Guess I have to wait for the stump to rot some and then dig it out. BTW, this wasn't the only steel left near the trees he planted, a lot of them have fence post, the T type, that supported the tree when it was planted, but then never removed. A lot of the remaining trees have grown around these fence posts as well.

Edited October 11, 20232 yr by Fred W. Hargis Jr

The stuff found in trees is always perplexing.  There is a small grove of Beech trees out back.  Found nice hooks in two of them for a hammock.  Used them a couple times and forgot about them.  They are now part of the tree and can't be seen let alone hook the hammock to them.

When I was about 6, my grandfather had his woods harvested to help pay off my grandmother's medical bills.  They actually had a mill set up in the woods instead of hauling off the logs.  One day, they hit a horseshoe embedded in the log from who knows when as my grandfather bought the farm in the 1920s.

Wow, that would have left a mark...massive kick-back potential. Glad you saw it. Disaster averted.