Stump Grinding in Twelve Stones Crossing, Goodlettsville

The pear the builder planted came apart in a storm

The developer street trees here went in around the turn of the century, which puts the Callery pears right at the age where they stop being landscaping and start being a liability. They split at the crotch in a summer gust, and what is left is a fifteen to twenty inch stump sitting in the most visible turf on the lot.

The complaint we actually hear is about the mower. A two or three inch collar left after a takedown is exactly the wrong height for a riding deck, and on a lot where the grass gets cut short and often, that collar eats a blade every few weeks. Add the sprinkler heads most of these yards run and you have something nobody can mow around and nobody can dig out without cutting a lateral.

The other version is out back: a red maple or a willow oak that came down because it was leaning toward the fairway, leaving a hole the sod crew will not touch until the stump and the top of the root plate are gone.

Access here runs down the side, never around the back

Fairway frontage is the selling point and the access problem in one. There is no rear gate on most of these lots because the yard opens straight onto the course, so a machine cannot come in the way it would on an ordinary subdivision lot. It goes down the side instead, through the pinch between your house and whatever the neighbor built on their side, and on Bella Vista Drive that pinch is often a masonry wing wall with about four feet of grass beside it.

We measure that gap before we commit to a date rather than when we arrive. Four feet is comfortable. Three and a half puts us on the narrow machine, which cuts slower for the same money. Under three feet and we are talking about coming across the front and around the far corner, or on a couple of Buffalo Run lots, staging in the driveway and walking the small unit through.

The cul-de-sac lots on Calebs Walk and Joshuas Run tend to be easier, since they pinch at the street and open out behind. The trailer still needs somewhere to sit that does not box in three driveways at once, so we ask which side of the circle is quiet on a weekday morning.

Four species, four different afternoons

Callery pear grinds fast. Soft wood, shallow plate, and a fifteen incher is usually finished and raked inside an hour. What surprises people is the pile, which is bigger than the tree ever looked.

Red maple sits in the middle. Quick feed, but the surface roots run well past where the canopy stopped, and if you want the ground flat enough to sod we end up chasing runners two or three feet out from the trunk.

Willow oak is the long one. Dense, fibrous, hard on carbide, and the ones planted at buildout are big enough now that a full grind is a half day by itself. The Leyland cypress screening the cart paths is the odd case: small stumps, but they come in rows, the wood is stringy enough to load the wheel, and the root balls sit in the mulch strip where the irrigation loop runs. We tell you from the photo which of those you have, and the number reflects it instead of averaging everything together.

Keeping the association off your back

Dues here run in the eighties to low nineties a month, and what the association notices is turf. Wheel ruts across a front lawn in April draw a letter faster than the stump ever did.

So we lay mats or plywood on any crossing that is not a driveway, we stay off the irrigated strip when the ground gives underfoot, and we photograph the lawn before the machine comes off the trailer. If we do mark the grass, fixing it is on us, and it is a much shorter conversation when there is a picture of what the yard looked like beforehand.

Grindings get hauled by default on the golf-frontage lots. Nobody facing a fairway wants a mound of chips crowned over a hole, and shoveling them into a bed only relocates the problem.

What we settle before a Twelve Stones job goes on the calendar

• The side-yard pinch measured at its narrowest point, at the post, not eyeballed from the street
• Whether the stump sits inside your line or on the course side of it
• Sprinkler heads and drip lines, since a locate ticket covers gas and cable but not your irrigation
• Where the trailer parks without blocking a neighbor's drive
• Hauled off or worked into a bed
• How deep you actually need it: mowing height, or deep enough to re-sod or set a post