Undergrowth and Brush Removal Around a Stump in Ashland City

What Grows Over a Stump in the River Bottoms

Leave a cut stump alone for two summers on the Ashland City flats and it disappears. Japanese honeysuckle comes over the top of it from the fence line, trumpet creeper climbs whatever stub is left standing, and greenbrier fills the space underneath with cane you cannot push a boot through. On the older county fencerows out toward Bandy Road it is privet, multiflora rose and blackberry instead.

The point worth knowing is that almost none of it is rooted in the stump. Cutting a honeysuckle runner where it crosses the wood does nothing at all to the plant, because the crown is thirty feet away against the fence. So we cut what stands between the machine and the work, and we tell you where the parent plant actually is, rather than letting you pay us to trim the same vines twice a year forever.

On the ridge lots the list is shorter and easier: mostly volunteer hackberry, winged euonymus and a hard mat of English ivy on the older properties.

Poison Ivy Is the One We Stop and Talk About

On a dead sycamore or box elder stub in the bottoms, the hairy grey vine climbing it is very often poison ivy, and the oil in it does not care that the vine is leafless or that it is January. It stays active on cut wood, on gloves and on the machine, and shredding a vine into the spoil puts it through everything you later rake by hand.

When we find it we point it out before anything is cut, then handle it deliberately: cut low, bagged rather than run through the wheel where that is possible, and the spoil flagged as material not to spread on a bed you weed in shorts. The one thing nobody should do with it is burn it, because the smoke carries the oil into your lungs.

It is a small item on a quote that turns into a bad fortnight if it goes unmentioned.

Clearing Enough to See the Flare Is Clearing Enough to Price It

Half the reason undergrowth comes off first is measurement. The price of a grind follows the diameter of the root flare at ground level, and a stump buried in privet gets quoted high because we have to assume the worst of what is under there. Twenty minutes with a saw and a rake regularly turns a 30-inch guess into a 22-inch fact, and the quote follows the fact.

Clearing also finds the things that end teeth. Under old brush around here we routinely turn up a strand of woven wire, a T-post cut off at the ground, a length of clothesline pipe set in a lump of concrete, and on the downtown lots, brick. Every bit of it gets marked and either pulled out or worked around at hand speed.

Where the Cuttings End Up

A wheelbarrow or two of vines and saplings goes out with us and never appears as a line on the quote. Beyond that it is volume, and volume costs either truck space or your time. On the county lots most people already have a burn spot, and the same permit rules that apply to a takedown pile apply to this material.

What we will not do is push the cuttings into a windrow against the neighbour's fence or over a bank toward a creek, which is where the previous crew usually put them. Loose brush on a bank above Marks Creek or Sycamore Creek is one storm away from being somebody's blocked culvert.

If the material is staying on the property, tell us where before we start. Moving a brush pile twice costs the same as moving it once, twice.

Undergrowth we cut for access, and what stays standing

• Honeysuckle, greenbrier and trumpet creeper taken off the stump and back three or four feet
• Privet and multiflora rose where they sit in the machine path, not the whole fencerow
• Volunteer hackberry and box elder saplings inside the working circle around the stump
• Poison ivy, cut low and kept out of the spoil rather than shredded into it
• Left alone: anything you planted on purpose, unless you point at it and tell us otherwise
• Left alone: a treeline, a fencerow or the back acre, which is a different trade entirely
• Metal, brick and concrete uncovered by the cutting gets flagged before the wheel starts