Stump Grinding in Drakewood, Portland, TN

There is old pipe under that maple stump

Drakewood was platted in 1974 and the original brick ranches and split-foyers came with the neighborhood. The silver maples and hackberries planted then are now fifty years old and throwing stumps well past thirty inches across.

The part nobody thinks about is what those trees grew over. Water and sewer taps from that era were not always set at the depth you would use today, and on the older parcels the service run from the meter to the house can be shallower than a foot in places. A big stump sitting a few feet off that line is not a reason to leave it, but it is a reason to be deliberate about how it comes out.

How we grind over a suspect service line

The 811 ticket marks the utility-owned side and stops at the meter. From the meter to your house, the line is yours, and it is usually the older and shallower half. So we probe. A steel rod every foot or so along the suspected run tells us quickly whether we are at eight inches or three feet, and we set the depth accordingly.

Where the line looks shallow we grind the top of the stump wide and flat, keep the wheel above the pipe corridor, and clean the last of the wood out by hand. It adds twenty minutes. It beats explaining to you why your yard has a geyser in it.

A thirty-inch stump is a different machine and price

There is a real jump between the mid-size stumps in the newer subdivisions and what Drakewood produces. A fifty-year silver maple with a thirty-four inch base and buttress roots running eight feet out is in the large-hardwood band, which in this market means somewhere from 350 to 700 depending on access and how much of the plate you want chased.

That is also a two to four hour job, not a stop on the way to somewhere else. When you call, give us the diameter across the widest part of the flare and whether a truck can get within thirty feet of it. Those two numbers get you an accurate price.

What hackberry and black locust do to grinder teeth

Hackberry is soft and stringy. It cuts fast but throws long ropey chips that wrap the wheel, and it tends to be hollow in the center, which means the stump you thought was solid collapses in on itself halfway through.

Black locust is the opposite and the hardest thing we routinely hit in Portland. It is dense, it does not rot, and an old locust fence post stump from before the subdivision went in will still be sound after decades in the ground. Locust and white oak are where carbide teeth earn their keep, and where a job runs long.

Quarter-acre originals, acre infills

Because Drakewood filled in slowly through 2017, you can stand on one street and see a 1,050 square foot original on a quarter acre next to a newer house on close to a full acre. The infill lots often kept the mature trees that were standing when the lot was cut, which is why a twelve-year-old house here can have a stump older than the neighborhood.

It also means chip disposal is worth discussing. On the bigger parcels there is somewhere to spread it. On the original quarter-acre lots there usually is not, and hauling is the sensible answer.