Stump Grinding on Lock Six Road, Hartsville
Lock Six is four minutes from the Square, so yes, we cover the whole road from the school end down to the river access. We work it between the morning and afternoon bus runs, and a photo sent early is usually priced by lunch.
One road, two completely different stump jobs
The upper end is brick ranches and split-foyers on lots averaging around an acre and three quarters. The silver maples that went in with those houses are now fifty years old and starting to fail, so the calls are big open-lawn stumps - easy wood, tricky timing, because the same quarter mile carries every school bus in the county.
Down at the bottom the road drops toward the Cumberland and the ground changes. Older farmhouses and cabins, sycamore and box elder, and soil that stays soft long after everything uphill has dried.
What brings people to the phone is the same in both places: a deck strike that happens in the same spot every pass, or a dish in the yard where the last stump rotted away and now stands water after a storm.
Grinding stumps around the Lock Six school bus runs
Trousdale County Elementary sits at 115 Lock Six Road with the school district office a few doors along at 103, and the EMS station is around the corner at 95 River Valley Drive. Between them, this quarter mile carries more scheduled traffic than anywhere in the county outside the Square.
We work it accordingly. Machines go in after the morning drop-off and come out before the afternoon run, and nothing parks anywhere an ambulance would need to pull out through. If your address is in the first few hundred, expect a window rather than a time, and expect that window to sit in the middle of the day.
Wet alluvial bottom decides when the grinder gets in
Below the houses you are on alluvial bottom - river-laid silt that holds water in the top foot long after the crown of the road has dried out. It is soft enough that a tracked machine can leave marks you will still be looking at next spring.
So on the lower addresses we watch the forecast rather than the diary. Two or three dry days is normally enough. Where it is not, we either mat the route or wait, because putting a rutted yard right costs more than the grind did in the first place.
It is not only the yard at stake. Silt bottom hides old fill, buried farm junk and the odd length of pipe from when these places were still working ground, and a wheel that drops into soft material mid-cut is harder on the machine and the operator than any hardwood on the road. Firm footing is a safety question as much as a cosmetic one.
Sycamore, box elder and willow grind nothing like a yard maple
River-bottom species are wet-wooded and soft, which sounds like good news and mostly is. Sycamore chips quickly but its plate is huge and shallow, so the finished area is far wider than the trunk implied. Box elder is soft to the point of spongy and often hollow at the middle, which means the wheel drops through the middle and then meets sound wood at the rim.
Black willow at the water's edge is the one to think twice about. Willow roots hold a bank together. If a stump sits on the drop to the river we will take the visible wood and leave the lateral system where it is, rather than loosening ground that has nothing else keeping it in place.
Sources
- Hartsville/Trousdale County Water & SewerProperty outside the utility's sewer footprint is on septic, which is what limits grinding depth on much of the road
What we do in Lock Six Road
Grinding Stumps in Lock Six Road: Your Questions
My septic field is right there. How deep can you go?
Hartsville/Trousdale Water and Sewer serves better than three thousand customers, but plenty of this road is outside the sewer footprint and on septic, and that field sets the limit rather than the stump does. Over a lateral we hold to six to eight inches and stop short of the trench lines entirely. Mark the field before we arrive - 811 will not, because it is your line, not a utility's.
Can you do it while the kids are at school?
That is our preference too. The quiet stretch is between the morning drop-off and the first afternoon buses, and a single mid-sized stump fits comfortably inside it. Larger jobs get split across two of those windows rather than run through a bus period, which is slower on paper and much less trouble for everybody on the road.
There is a stump near the turnaround at the river access. Whose is that?
Depends where the property line falls, and at the Lock Six access it is not always where people assume. If it is on public ground it is a call to the county at 328 Broadway rather than to us. If it is inside your line, we can take it, though the ground down there is the softest on the road and it will get scheduled after a dry spell.
Do you take the chips or leave them?
On lots this size most people keep them. An acre and three quarters gives you a fencerow or a back corner to spread them thin, and they break down over a couple of seasons. Say the word and we will barrow them where you want. If you would rather they went, they go in the truck and that gets priced in at the quote.