Once a tree is down, there is a stump, and there are two ways to deal with it. They get talked about as if they are the same service. They are not, and picking the wrong one costs you either money or a do-over.
Grinding
A grinder chews the stump into chips, working down below ground level — normally four to eight inches under, deeper if you ask. The roots stay in the ground and rot away over the following years. What is left is a shallow depression full of wood chips and soil.
You get: a flat spot you can rake out, top with loam, and seed or sod.
You do not get: clean soil. Wood chips break down slowly and tie up nitrogen while they do it, which is why a patch seeded straight into raw grindings often comes in thin. Rake most of the chips out and bring in loam and it behaves normally.
Cost: far less than removal, and it is usually a short job — a small stump can be twenty minutes.
Full removal
The whole stump and its main root plate come out of the ground, usually with an excavator. It leaves a genuine hole, sometimes a surprisingly large one, plus a pile of soil-covered roots to get rid of and a need for fill.
Cost: several times the price of grinding, plus fill, plus repairing whatever the machine drove over.
Which one do you need?
Grinding is the right answer for nearly everything. Choose removal only when one of these applies:
- You are building on it. A slab, a footing, a patio base, an addition. Buried wood rots, and rotting wood under a slab means settlement.
- You are running something through it. A fence line, a utility trench, an irrigation main.
- You are replanting in exactly the same spot. A new tree needs real soil volume, and a ground stump leaves a mass of decaying roots where the root ball needs to go. Planting three or four feet to the side and grinding is usually the better answer anyway.
- You have a root disease you do not want to keep feeding. Some root pathogens live on in the stump. If a disease was the reason the tree came out, ask about this specifically.
For everything else — you want grass, you want a garden bed, you are tired of mowing around it, the roots keep sending up shoots — grinding does the job for a fraction of the price.
A few things people ask
Can I just leave it? You can. It will rot over ten or fifteen years depending on species, and while it does it will host carpenter ants and, in some species, keep sending up suckers you will have to keep cutting.
Do the roots keep growing? No. Without a canopy the roots have no way to feed themselves. They decay in place.
What about the shoots? Some species — poplar, willow, locust, sometimes maple — will push suckers from the root system after the tree is cut. Grinding the stump removes the crown that most of them come from and knocks it back a long way; the occasional straggler is a job for a mower.
Old stumps? Fine. A stump from four years ago grinds much the same as one from last week, and it is generally a quick job. If you have three or four around the property it is worth doing them all in one visit.
If you are not sure which one your situation calls for, describe it when you call and we will tell you. It costs nothing to ask, and grinding is usually the honest answer.