Stump Grinding in Rolling Meadows, Hartsville

There was never a tree here, so where did the stump come from?

The tract was open ground before it was platted. Nobody in Rolling Meadows has a hundred-year-old maple in the front yard, and that is exactly why the calls from this subdivision are odd ones.

What comes up under new sod is what the grader buried: cut-off trunks, root balls pushed into the fill when the site was made ready, sometimes a whole hedgerow rolled into a low spot and covered over. Two summers of settling later there is a hard lump the mower finds, a strip of grass that browns off ahead of the rest of the yard, or a dish that keeps a puddle for days.

On a quarter-acre lot that is not some far corner you can ignore. The platted lots run about nine and a half thousand square feet and the house takes most of it.

Finding the thing before we grind it

A buried root ball does not announce itself, but the signs are consistent. Blades scalp the same patch every pass. Sod dries out early over the spot because there is wood under the roots instead of soil. A shallow depression deepens a little each wet season, and mushrooms sometimes come up in a rough line where a trunk was laid down.

We probe before we cut. A steel bar tells you inside five minutes whether this is eight inches of buried trunk or a three-foot ball still holding half a ton of dirt. Dirt is the operative word - packed soil in an old root ball blunts teeth faster than any hardwood in the county, so we knock or wash the working face clean and then grind wood.

Nowhere to put stump grindings on a Rolling Meadows lot

One stump turns into roughly triple the heap people imagine, and a root ball with soil bound into it makes more again. On a lot this size, with a covenant setting a fourteen hundred square foot minimum and a hundred dollar a year association, there is no back fencerow to tip it on.

So nearly every job here is grind and haul. The county convenience center on Broadway does accept limbs, stumps and yard waste, but it takes the equivalent of one level pickup load per day and it is shut at weekends - workable for a homeowner tidying a corner, no use at all for the spoil off a full grind. We bring the truck and it leaves with us.

Shallow new taps under a slab lot, and grinding depth

These lots came with water and sewer taps in the price, which means the service lines are recent, they were trenched in after the grading, and the backfill over them is looser than the ground either side. Worth saying out loud before anybody puts a cutting wheel in the yard.

Tennessee 811 wants three working days and will mark the utility side of it. It will not mark what went in afterwards - the irrigation loop, the lighting run along the walk, the dog wire around the perimeter. On a new build those are the lines that actually get cut, and you are the only person who knows where they went. Near the slab itself we stay outside the footing and cut straight down rather than undermining it.

Signs there is builder debris under your new sod

• The mower scalps the same patch every single pass
• One strip of grass browns off two weeks ahead of the rest
• A shallow dish that holds water and grows a little each wet season
• The sod feels hollow underfoot in one place after rain
• A post auger stopped dead at eighteen inches
• Mushrooms coming up in a rough line across the lawn in fall