Stump Grinding in Lakeside Estates, Springfield

The Low End of the Lot Never Really Dries

Lakeside Estates runs off Hillside Road on lots averaging around seven-tenths of an acre, and the ground falls away across most of them. Houses sit on the high side, the yard runs down, and the bottom of it stays soft for a good part of the year. That is where the sycamores and box elders are, and it is generally where the stump you want dealt with is too.

A machine that walks across Canterbury without leaving a mark will rut this ground badly, and a loaded trailer that gets down there in a wet week may not come back up. That is not a reason to say no. It is a reason to book it into the right week.

Half the skill in a Lakeside job is choosing the day.

Reading the Slope Before the Trailer Leaves

What we want from you on the phone is a picture taken from the house looking down the yard, not just a close-up of the stump. That shows us the fall, whether the route crosses the low ground, and where the truck can reasonably sit.

Near the house, up around Lakeside Drive or Spring Circle, this is ordinary work. Down at the bottom we bring mats and lay a track in, or we wait. Mats add time to a visit rather than a large number to the invoice, and they are cheaper than a rutted yard that both of us have to look at afterward.

After three or four dry days in summer most of these lots are workable end to end. In February a lot of them are not, and we will say so rather than take your money and gouge a path across your lawn.

Wet-Ground Trees Grind Like Wet-Ground Trees

Sycamore and box elder dominate the low side, and both are soft, fast-feeding wood that costs less per inch than the oaks up the hill. What they are not is clean. Both throw broad shallow root plates in saturated soil, and those plates come up carrying a great deal of mud and gravel with them.

Mud is abrasive. A softwood stump in wet ground can wear teeth as quickly as a dry hickory does, and it packs the wheel so the machine has to be cleared out repeatedly. That is time, and it goes into the quote for anything below the break in slope.

Up on the built lots it is willow oak, pin oak, silver maple and cedar along the old pasture edges, all of which behave normally and price normally.

Backfill on Ground That Moves

A hole in the low part of a Lakeside lot does not stay where you put it. Ground material holds water like a sponge, and if you pack a wet hollow full of it, it will sit soggy through the winter and drop three or four inches by spring.

So down there we take most of the material away, backfill with the soil that came out plus clean fill if there is not enough, tamp it in layers and mound it well above grade. Then you leave it a season before seeding and top it once more when it has found its level.

Up on the dry side of the same property the usual approach is fine: material back in, mounded a couple of inches, seed in a few weeks. Two ends of one yard, two different finishes, and it is worth asking which one your stump falls under before you order sod.