Stump Grinding in Swinging Bridge Heights, Old Hickory

The stump is below you, not behind you

The name is not decoration. These lots stand above the old crossing at Swinging Bridge Road and fall away hard toward the river, and a fair share of the trees people take down were growing on that drop rather than on the flat part of the yard. So the stump is thirty or forty feet down a bank you can barely walk in wet shoes, and every contractor who has looked at it has said they would have to figure something out.

Meanwhile the level ground has its own version of the problem. On a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom, one-bath house, the flat part of the lot is where everything happens: the parking, the shed, the kids, the grill. Losing eight feet of it to a silver maple stump matters far more here than it would on an acre.

Grinding across the fall instead of driving down it

A stump grinder is a top-heavy machine on a narrow track and it does not belong pointed downhill. On the Keeton Avenue and Hiller Drive drops we set up across the slope, crib the uphill side to bring the deck near level, and run a winch line to a truck or a solid anchor above so the machine is held rather than braked. The operator stands on the high side, always.

That is slower than a flat-lawn grind and it is priced that way, but it is the difference between a finished job and a machine lying on its side in the river brush. If your slope is steeper than roughly one in three, we walk it before quoting instead of guessing from a photograph.

Black walnut is the stump that costs you time

Walnut does well on these river slopes and it is the densest thing we routinely meet here: dark, tight-grained, hard on carbide, slow to feed no matter how fresh the teeth are. A twenty-four-inch walnut on a bank can take as long as a thirty-six-inch maple on the flat.

The chips deserve their own conversation. Walnut carries juglone, which suppresses tomatoes, peppers and a long list of ornamentals, so walnut grindings are the one batch we suggest hauling off rather than spreading in a bed. Eastern red cedar, the other slope regular, is the reverse - light, aromatic, easy cutting - except that it drives a taproot straight into whatever rock seam it can find, so the last few inches take longer than the first foot.

What people are usually trying to do with the space

Nearly every call from the Heights has a project behind it. A carport going in beside a house that never had a garage. A driveway widened because two cars will not fit nose to tail on a grade. A retaining wall or timber steps heading down toward the old crossing. In each case the stump is not the goal, it is the thing standing between you and the concrete truck.

Tell us what is going in and we grind to suit it. Under a slab or a footing we go past the usual six to twelve inches and take out more of the lateral wood, because a root left under fresh concrete becomes a crack in about five years. Under grass there is no reason to go that far, and no reason for you to pay for it. One more thing worth saying out loud: a one-bath house being extended usually means a plumber trenching from the street, and a stump sitting anywhere along that line should come out before he starts, not after he has laid pipe you now have to work around.