Large Stump Removal in Ashland City
A four-foot sycamore on the river flats is not a bigger version of an ordinary job. It is most of a day, a machine that will never fit a gate, and a spoil pile decided on before we start.
Measure the Flare, Not the Trunk
People quote us a diameter taken at chest height on the tree that used to be there. The number that matters is across the flare at ground level, and on a bottomland species the two are nowhere near each other. A silver maple that measured thirty inches where the saw went through can be fifty-two across the buttress, and sycamore is worse, throwing wide ribbed roots that break the surface a good four feet out.
Anything over thirty-six inches at grade changes how the job is planned. It is no longer a walk-behind proposition, the working circle needs eight or nine feet of clear ground, and the time runs three to six hours instead of one.
The cheap way to get an accurate figure is one picture taken square down on the cut with a yardstick across it, plus a second from far enough back to show the flare and the ground around it. That is enough to price the job properly instead of quoting a range and revising it in your driveway.
The Service Drop Comes Down First
Power out here is a member co-op, Cumberland Electric Membership Corporation, not a city utility, and it keeps twenty feet of right-of-way cleared on each side of its lines. On its own lines CEMC does the trimming and hauls off what it cuts, and members are told plainly not to prune inside that right-of-way themselves.
The part that affects a big stump is the service line to the house. Where the drop runs through the canopy or over the work zone, a member has to contact CEMC on 800-987-2362 and set up a service order to have the line dropped before pruning or removal begins. That is a scheduled visit, not a same-morning phone call, and locally it is the top reason a booked job moves to the following week.
So make that call when you book the felling, not when the grinder is already loaded. If the drop is clear of the stump and the machine's swing, none of this applies and we get on with it.
Getting a Big Machine In Without Wrecking the Approach
A tracked grinder that can chew a fifty-inch plate is thirty-four to forty-two inches across and heavy enough to leave its mark on a soft lawn. Out on the dead-end lanes off Highway 12 South, the stumps are old oak and poplar sitting two or three hundred feet from anywhere a truck can stand, down a drive with no turnaround at the end. That is a walk-in, and the walk counts as time.
In town the constraint is the opposite one. The machine will not thread a side yard, so the route is either the driveway to a rear gate wide enough to take it, or a fence panel out and back in.
On wet ground we mat. Plywood is fine for a walk-behind; a tracked machine on saturated river silt wants proper mats, and the honest alternative is waiting for the ground. We would rather push a big job to the following week than hand back a lawn with two ruts running the length of it.
Four Feet of Stump Is a Lot of Spoil
Run the arithmetic before you decide the chips can stay. A forty-eight-inch stump taken to twelve inches below grade, with the flare chased out, produces somewhere around four to six cubic yards of loose grindings. That is two pickup loads with the sides on, sitting in the middle of a lawn.
Crowned back into the hole, that volume fills it and leaves a low mound that will settle through the year. Some people want exactly that. Others want the yard flat by the weekend, which means loading out, and on a big river maple the material is heavy and wet, so haul-off on a large stump is priced separately and honestly rather than folded in as a vague extra.
The third option, spreading the chips as mulch across beds, works fine for hardwood but sours quickly with green silver maple in summer heat. If you want them spread, age the pile in an out-of-the-way corner for a couple of months first.
What Makes a Stump a Big Job Here
- Thirty-six inches or more measured across the flare at grade, not at the old cut
- Buttressed sycamore and silver maple, where the roots surface three or four feet out
- A service drop crossing the work zone and needing a CEMC disconnect first
- Ground that will not take a tracked machine without mats laid first
- Two hundred feet or more between the nearest truck position and the stump
- Four to six cubic yards of grindings that have to go somewhere
Sources
- CEMC Vegetation ManagementTwenty feet of right-of-way cleared each side; members must call 800-987-2362 to have the service line dropped before pruning or removal
Common Questions
Is there a size you turn down?
Diameter is rarely the thing that stops us; access is. We have no trouble with a five-foot river maple sitting in an open yard. A three-foot stump wedged between a foundation wall and a retaining wall with a thirty-inch gap is the harder call. Send photos of the stump and of the route in, and you will get a straight answer, including on the days the answer is that it needs a different machine than ours.
Can a big stump be done in stages to spread the cost?
It can, but it usually costs more overall because you are paying to bring the machine twice. What does genuinely reduce a big-stump bill is combining it with anything else on the property in the same visit, and dealing with the chips yourself. If budget is the constraint, say so when you ring and you will get told which parts of the scope actually move the number.
The old oak is on a slope above my driveway. Is that a problem?
It is a planning item rather than a problem. The machine has to work on a bench cut across the slope so it is not perched, and the spoil has to be kept from running downhill onto the drive or into a swale. On the bluff-side lots in town there is an added consideration, which is that pushing material over the edge toward the river is not an option we will take, whatever the gradient makes tempting.
Will a stump this size damage my septic field if you drive over it?
It can, which is why we route around it. Tank lids and laterals on older county systems sit shallow, and a loaded tracked machine crossing a drainfield can crush a line or compact the soil that the field depends on. Mark the tank and the field before we arrive. If the only path to the stump crosses the field, we mat that section or hand-walk a smaller machine in.
How much of the root plate actually comes out?
The stump, the buttress and the upper plate to whatever depth we agreed, plus the surface roots for a few feet out where they would otherwise catch a mower. What stays is the deep and outer lateral system, which on a mature river maple can run past the old drip line. It decays in place over five to ten years. Nobody removes all of it without excavating the yard.