Stump Grinding in Tyne Meade, Forest Hills

Tyne Meade's problem is the gap between the houses

Lots in Tyne Meade run just under an acre, which makes them the smallest in Forest Hills, and the houses on them have been getting bigger for twenty years. A 1951 ranch that took up a modest share of its lot now sits beside a six-thousand-square-foot rebuild that takes up most of its own, and the strip of ground between the two is what is left over.

That strip is where the trees are. A silver maple planted when the first house went up is now seventy-odd years old and standing in a corridor eight or ten feet wide, with a condenser pad on one side, a downspout drain on the other and a fence at the end of it.

When it finally comes down - and silver maples that age come down - the stump is in the single most awkward square yard on the property. Nothing about grinding it is hard. Getting to it is the entire job.

Measure the gap, not the stump

The first number we want from a Tyne Meade caller is not the trunk diameter. It is the narrowest point between the street and the stump - usually a gate, sometimes the pinch between a chimney chase and a fence post.

A standard walk-behind wants about three feet of clear passage. Under that, we go to a narrower machine, and the honest trade is speed: a narrow wheel takes a smaller bite, so a 30-inch silver maple that would be ninety minutes in an open yard becomes the better part of an afternoon in a corridor. That is not a surcharge for being difficult, it is just how many passes the wheel has to make.

Measure post to post rather than eyeballing it, and check whether the gate leaf can come off its hinges. Two inches decides which machine leaves the shop.

Silver maple grinds soft, wide, and full of old hardware

Seventy years of being the tree next to the clothesline leaves a mark. Silver maple grows fast and swallows things, and side-yard specimens here routinely have chain-link woven into the base, a hook, a strand of old wire, or a length of pipe somebody drove in during the Eisenhower administration.

Metal is what wrecks teeth, not oak. So on an old side-yard maple we go slowly around the outside of the flare, and if the wheel finds something, we stop and dig it out by hand rather than chewing through it.

The wood itself is soft and the base flares broadly, which means the finished hole is wider than the trunk led anyone to expect. Water oak and pin oak from the same era behave better under the wheel but flare almost as far.

The new build next door changed the ground

A rebuild raises grade. Fill gets brought in, the pad gets set higher than the old one, and the strip along the property line ends up with several inches of new soil over what used to be the surface.

That is frequently why the old maple died in the first place - buried root collars suffocate slowly, and the tree looks fine for years before it stops looking fine all at once. It also matters to us, because the stump you can see may be sitting a foot above where the real base is. We probe for the original grade before we quote depth rather than after.

One more thing on the boundary: chip does not get mounded against a new foundation or a neighbor's fence line. On lots this narrow it comes out with us.

Where the chip goes when there is no back corner

On an acre of woods you can crown the hole and forget it. On a Tyne Meade side yard there is nowhere for a pile to be, and a mound between two houses is going to bother somebody by the second week.

So haul-away is the default here, and it is priced in from the start rather than added on. We fill the hole with what came out of the top of it, keep the rest in the truck, and leave the strip walkable the same afternoon.