Stump Grinding in Chickering Park, Forest Hills

The stump the whole pike can see

Chickering Park sits on the Hillsboro Pike face of the city, and that changes what a leftover stump feels like. Set back on a wooded acre off Granny White nobody would notice it for a year. Here it is twenty feet from an apron that several thousand cars pass every day, and it reads from the road exactly the way a dead limb over a porch reads - as something somebody has stopped keeping up with.

The second thing that happens is paperwork. Because this is Forest Hills and not Metro Nashville, taking a tree down on a lot like this can trip the city's canopy retention ratio, and the owner ends up filing a planting plan on top of everything else. By the time most people call us they are already halfway into that process and want to know which part of it we handle. The honest answer: we handle the wood in the ground, and we can tell you what the rest of it looks like so nothing catches you sideways.

The city reviews removals, not grindings

Forest Hills kept its own charter through the 1963 consolidation, so a tree here is a city matter, not a Metro one, and the ordinance has real teeth. A permit is required before most trees eight inches in caliper or larger come down, homeowner or contractor. It costs nothing. Trees already dead, trees the wind put on the ground, invasives on the state's exotic pest plant list and anything under eight inches are outside it.

Where it bites is the ratio. Drop below the canopy your zoning district is supposed to retain and you owe the city a tree planting plan, and an approved removal of a healthy native tree comes with inch-for-inch replacement using something similar. Clear-cutting is simply not allowed.

Grinding an existing stump does not touch any of that. But if the tree is still standing, sort the permit first - it is free and it is faster than unwinding a violation afterward.

Water oak is the tree that surprises people here

The mix here runs white oak and American beech on the older wooded ground, tulip poplar wherever the soil holds water, and a fair amount of water oak, loblolly pine and green ash that came in with the houses.

Water oak is the one that catches owners out. It looks like a permanent tree and behaves like a temporary one - eighty years is a good run, and long before that the butt hollows out while the crown still looks fine. Grinding a hollow water oak is quick through the middle and slow around the rim, because the sound shell at the outside is the hardest wood on the stump.

Green ash is the other clock. The city runs an emerald ash borer program for a reason, and a dead ash goes brittle fast. It is exempt from the removal permit once it is dead, which is a small mercy, but it is also the tree most likely to shed on somebody while everybody waits for a better month.

Grinding ten feet off a road nobody slows down on

Anything on the pike frontage gets a different setup than a stump behind a house. We stage in the driveway rather than on the shoulder, we do not back a trailer out into through traffic, and the discharge side of the machine faces away from the pavement so chip is not thrown into the road or onto a passing windshield.

It is also why we schedule pike-front work mid-morning where we can. Trying to load a grinder off a trailer on Hillsboro Pike at five in the afternoon is a bad idea for everybody standing near it.

Do not replant in the same hole

If a planting plan means a replacement tree is going in, put it four to six feet to the side of where the old one stood, not in the ground you just had ground out. A grind mixes a large volume of fresh wood into that soil, and while it breaks down the bacteria doing the work pull nitrogen away from anything trying to root in it. A young replacement planted straight into that mix sulks for two or three seasons.

If the plan really does require the same spot, tell us in advance. We will take the hole deeper and haul the grindings off rather than backfilling with them, and you bring in clean topsoil instead.