Pine and Eastern Red Cedar Stump Grinding in Hartsville

Most Pine Stumps Here Turn Out to Be Red Cedar

Eastern red cedar is not a pine. It is a juniper, Juniperus virginiana, and it is the single most common woody thing to colonise abandoned pasture in Middle Tennessee. Stop grazing a Trousdale hillside and in fifteen years you have a cedar thicket; that is the whole story of the field edges out toward Halltown, Storytown and the Highway 231 South hollows.

This matters commercially because pine and cedar are priced off two different behaviours. Pine is resinous. It gums the wheel, mats the chips into a wet cake, and stains concrete a colour that does not come out. Cedar does none of that. Cedar powders. It comes off the wheel as fine dry red-brown dust and it does not gum anything.

So if somebody quoted your job as pine and warned you about resin, they either have not seen the stump or they are working from a price list rather than from the tree. What actually costs money on a cedar is the shape of it and the grit in the flare.

A Fluted Cedar Stump Makes the Tape Lie

Cedar does not grow round. Mature red cedar develops deep vertical flutes and an off-centre heart, so a trunk that measures eighteen inches one way measures eleven the other, and the flare at ground level is a star shape rather than a circle. That has three consequences on the day.

First, phone quotes off a single tape measurement come in wrong. Measure the widest and narrowest and give us both. Second, the wheel cannot sweep a smooth arc through it — it meets wood, then air, then wood again, and that intermittent loading is harder on a machine than solid hardwood at the same width. Third, and this is the real cost, the valleys between the flutes fill with soil, leaf pack and small rock over the decades. Grinding a cedar flare without washing it out first means running teeth through dirt.

A typical pasture cedar, fourteen to twenty inches across the widest point, is twenty-five to forty minutes and lands in the one-fifty to two-fifty band.

Cedar Stumps Never Soften, So Waiting Does Not Help

People try to wait cedar out. It does not work, and the reason is the same chemistry that made cedar the fence post of choice on every farm in this county for a century.

Cedar heartwood carries thujaplicins and related compounds that fungi will not touch. A cedar post set in the ground in 1970 is often still solid at the groundline today. The sapwood ring on a cut stump greys and flakes off within a couple of years, which makes the stump look like it is going, but underneath that the red heart stays sound essentially indefinitely. We have ground cedar stumps in old fence lines that were cut before the nuclear plant was cancelled in 1984 and they came off the wheel as bright as fresh timber.

Compare that with hackberry, punky at the heart in fifty years, or a poplar that will be a soft ring of bark in eight. If you have cedar stumps and you are hoping time will handle them, it will not. It will just make them harder to find in the grass.

Cedar Stump Grinding Throws Red Dust That Stains Fast

Cedar spoil is a strong red-brown and it is fine enough to travel. It will discolour a white board fence, light vinyl siding, a concrete pad, a new gravel drive and anything hanging on a line, and it does it in one pass. The dust is also strongly aromatic, which is pleasant for about the first ten minutes.

So the setup on a cedar job is about aim rather than volume. We point the discharge at open ground, tarp anything painted or poured within about twenty feet, and where the stump is right against a barn wall we shift to a slower pass with a lower wheel speed to keep the throw down. Tell us before we arrive if there is washing on the line or a vehicle you cannot move.

One more local point. Red cedar is the alternate host for cedar-apple rust. If you are grinding cedars because of an orchard, the galls are in the live crown, not the stump, and removing stumps does nothing for that problem on its own.

What changes on a cedar or pine job

• Measure the widest and narrowest points of a fluted cedar and give us both
• Wash or dig the leaf pack and soil out of the flutes before we come, if you can
• Cedar heartwood does not rot, so an old stump is not a cheap stump
• Red dust stains concrete, siding and board fence — tell us what to tarp
• Cedar does not gum a wheel; true pine and Leyland cypress do
• Cedar stumps do not throw sprouts, so nothing comes back afterward
• A field full of small pasture cedars prices by the hour, not by the stump