Stump Grinding on Otter Creek Road, Forest Hills
Otter Creek Road is a yes from one end to the other, Otter Valley Lane and Laurel Ridge Drive included - six minutes for us. Stumps out here run big enough that we prefer to measure them ourselves, so we come look and leave you a written number.
Otter Creek Road is where the genuinely big stumps are
Otter Creek Road is the one street in 37215 where the acreage is real. Parcels run two and a half to nearly four acres, the houses range from a 1930 manor to nine-thousand-square-foot customs from the 2000s, and the Radnor Lake entrance is on the road itself.
The trees match. What stands on these lots are canopy white oaks, tulip poplars, beech and sycamore that were here long before any of the houses, and when one of them fails the stump left behind is three to five feet across. That is not a bigger version of a suburban stump. A 48-inch oak has roughly four times the wood of a 24-inch one, and the buttress spreads out eight or ten feet from centre.
And it is rarely near the road. On a three-acre parcel the stump is usually a couple of hundred feet down a wooded private drive, or off it entirely, in ground that has never had a vehicle on it.
A four-foot stump is not two two-foot stumps
Wood volume climbs with the square of the diameter, and time on the machine climbs with it. Double the width and you have roughly quadrupled the job.
So a mature hardwood out here sits at the top of the range and sometimes past it. The usual band for a large hardwood stump runs three-fifty to seven hundred, and that assumes reasonable access and a stump you can walk around. A five-foot white oak at the end of a wooded drive is a full day for a machine and a crew, and we will say so rather than quote a number we would have to revise standing on the lot.
Depth is also different. Half a foot to a foot below grade is the usual target, but on a stump this wide the flare alone can stand a foot proud of the ground, so the wheel is working well before it reaches what anybody would call grade. That is the part of the day nobody sees in the estimate and it is why we measure in person.
The drive is the other half of the estimate
Several hundred feet of private drive between the pavement and the work changes everything, and it is where the surprises live.
We want to know the surface - gravel that has softened after rain will not take a loaded trailer the way asphalt will. We want to know the lowest limb over it, because a grinder on a trailer needs real height and a branch at eleven feet stops the whole trip. We want to know whether there is a culvert or a small bridge over a branch of the creek, and roughly what it was built to carry. And we want to know if there is anywhere to turn around at the house, because reversing eight hundred feet down a wooded drive in the dark at the end of a long day is how equipment gets damaged.
None of that is difficult. All of it is much easier answered before the trailer is hooked up.
Grinding beside a bikeway, a school and a park entrance
Otter Creek Road carries more than estate traffic. Percy Priest Elementary sits at 1700, the city's John C. Lovell Bikeway runs a mile and a half from the school down to Radnor Lake, and the natural area's entrance brings a steady stream of walkers and cyclists along the same pavement.
So we do not park on the shoulder here if there is any alternative, and there almost always is - these properties have room. Where a trailer genuinely has to sit near the road we cone it well back and we avoid the school run entirely, working the middle of the day rather than the ends of it.
It is a small courtesy and it is also self-interest. A grinder trailer half on a narrow shoulder where a bike path crosses is a bad photograph waiting to happen.
Where a hundred years of chip actually goes
A five-foot oak produces an amount of grinding that has to be seen to be believed - several cubic yards of it, two to three times what the homeowner pictured, in a cone taller than the person standing next to it.
On three acres there is a good answer to that. Most owners here have us barrow the surplus into the woods or along a walking path where it breaks down over a couple of years and does some good as it goes. Oak chip is slow to rot and makes a decent surface underfoot.
Hauling it off is available and it is not cheap on a stump this size, because it is a genuine truckload rather than a wheelbarrow. Decide before the day. It is the single most common thing people have not thought about when they book a big one.
What we need to know about a long private drive
- Total length from the road and whether the surface is asphalt, gravel or grass
- The lowest branch over it, measured or guessed honestly - eleven feet stops us
- Any culvert, bridge or soft shoulder along the way and what it will carry
- Whether there is space to turn a truck and trailer at the top
- How far off the drive the stump sits and what the ground between them is like
- Whether a gate or cattle grid narrows the entrance
What we do in Otter Creek Road
Nearby Forest Hills neighborhoods
Questions from the Otter Creek estates
Why will you not price a big stump from a photograph?
Because at this size the photo hides the two things that matter. It flattens the flare, so a stump that measures four feet across the cut may be seven feet across at the ground, and it tells us nothing about the route in. On smaller suburban stumps a picture is genuinely enough. Out here a twenty-minute visit produces a number that will not need changing.
Can you get to a stump three hundred feet into the woods?
Often, yes, and it depends on what is between here and there rather than the distance itself. Standing timber we have to weave through, a ravine, or ground that stays soft are the limits. If a machine can be walked in on a reasonable line we will do it, and if it cannot we will tell you what the alternative looks like rather than making a bad attempt at it.
Do I need the city's permission to take down a big oak on my own acreage?
Yes, if it is alive and eight inches or better in caliper - acreage makes no difference, Forest Hills wants the permit either way and charges nothing for it. Take the lot under the canopy your zoning district retains and you will be filing a planting plan too, with a comparable native going back in at matching caliper. Trees already dead or blown down are outside all of it.
What does the crew do about the hole a big stump leaves?
Fills and crowns it. On a stump this wide the void underneath is substantial once the buttress is out, so we backfill in layers rather than tipping everything in at once, then leave a mound over the top because chip and soil both settle over the first year. Level on the day means dished by next spring, which is why the mound looks excessive at first.
How much of a day should I expect equipment on the property?
For anything four feet and up, plan on the whole day and do not plan on parking in the drive. For a pair of mid-sized stumps closer to the house, a morning. We will give you a window when we book and call if we are running behind, because on a property with a long private approach nobody wants to guess whether the gate needs to be open.