I have (or had) a GINORMOUS ponytail that I had to remove because the PO of my house placed a lot of stone around it and the stones and root ball crushed two of my sprinkler zones. The only way to repair it was to remove the ponytail. What a job!

I had to chop the trunk one bit at a time to get the rootball out, my questions are:

1. Can I leave any of the enormous amount of small sized material with little roots sticking out in the hole? Or will it re-grow the tree from roots.

2. Can whatever is left over (which is a lot) be left to dry out and be left as a mulch bed (is it any use as mulch?) for some of my fruit trees or will the roots sticking out of the small bits re-grow into another tree?

3. Or is the safest path to proceed to pickup every piece and throw it out with the trash over a few weeks?

I really like the idea of keeping the bio material but do not want to be chasing little trees around as I have no idea if the roots are weed like able to sprout anew.