Stump Grinding in Bridle Creek, White House, TN

The tree that made this a nice lot is now at the bottom of it

Bridle Creek was marketed as a tree-lined community with brick-front homes on spacious homesites, and the developer meant it: planting and retained growth were concentrated along the rear lot lines against a creek drainage. Twenty years on, that is exactly where the failures are.

Which puts the average job here at the far corner of the lot, downhill, behind a six-foot privacy fence, on ground that stays damp because the whole drainage does. A willow oak or a black cherry at the back of a Thoroughbred Way lot is not a difficult stump. It is a difficult forty feet.

Getting a grinder down the slope, and back up

Lots run 0.23 to 0.52 acre with the street average about 0.35, and most fall away from the house. Going down with a loaded machine is easy and slightly alarming; coming back up a wet slope with it is the part that needs planning.

We walk it first, every time. Where the fall is gentle, boards on the route are enough. Where it is not, the machine goes down empty of everything it can be emptied of and comes back on a winch line, and the shavings do not come up at all. That last point drives a lot of Bridle Creek decisions: material generated at the bottom of a slope is far cheaper to spread and grade in place than to barrow uphill through a gate. If the spot is out of sight behind the fence, spreading is usually the sensible answer.

One more thing about the fall on these lots. Water that comes off the back of a Saddleview Drive or Bridlewood Court yard has been collecting from several lots above it by the time it reaches the bottom corner, so the wettest ground is exactly where the trees the community was sold on are standing. That is not a reason to avoid the work, but it is the reason we book rear-lot Bridle Creek jobs in the drier half of the year whenever the homeowner can wait.

Finishing to the standard an association expects

There is an HOA here and, unlike the no-covenant pockets elsewhere in town, somebody does notice an open grind hole in a back yard that backs onto common ground. Associations vary in what they write down, but the expectation in practice is consistent: level, no void, no bare crater, grass re-established within a season.

So we finish Bridle Creek jobs differently from a farm lot. The void gets the coarse material back in, then a soil cap, then it is raked to grade and seeded rather than left to settle over two winters. If the stump sat on the boundary against common area, it is worth a message to your board before the date rather than after; nobody has ever objected, but the ones who found out afterwards asked more questions.

What the creek line grew, and how it grinds

The species list at the back of these lots is not the front-yard list. Willow oak is the big one and it is genuinely dense, so a 28-inch willow oak takes real time and finishes in the $350 to $600 band. Black cherry along the creek is softer but usually multi-stemmed and leaning. Red maple and eastern red cedar fill in between.

Both the oak and the cherry hold water in the root plate on ground like this, and a stump that has been standing dead for two seasons in a wet corner comes apart in wet slabs rather than dry chips. That is not a problem, but it doubles the volume of material to deal with and it is why an on-site look sometimes beats a photo quote at the back of a Grayson Lane lot.

What restoring a rear-lot grind spot involves

• Coarse shavings returned to the void and compacted in layers, not tipped in loose
• A soil cap of three to four inches over the top so seed has something to root into
• Surface raked flat to the surrounding grade rather than left mounded
• Seed and straw on the spot before we leave, in season
• Any surface root within the mown area cut below blade height
• The fence panel or gate rehung and latched before the truck moves