Stump Grinding at Cato and the Dixon Creek End

It came out of the ground at ten minutes to one in the morning

The EF-1 on April 1, 2023 was on the ground for five minutes, 12:53 to 12:58, and covered six miles from a start point east-northeast of Hartsville. The survey describes snapped and uprooted trees, a house on Dixon Creek Road that lost around sixty percent of its roof, and six outbuildings destroyed outright.

Out this way it uprooted more than it broke, and an uprooted tree is a different problem from a snapped one. What it leaves is a tipped root plate - a vertical disc of roots and soil standing four or six feet high with a crater beside it where the whole thing levered out.

Three growing seasons later the plate has grass on it, the crater is holding water, and the entire arrangement is precisely where the tree left it.

A tipped plate is two jobs, not one

Grinding is not where this starts. The plate has to be cut free of the trunk, laid back down into the hole it came out of, and the crater dealt with, because there is no running a machine at a four-foot vertical wall of dirt.

The dirt is the real expense. A root plate is at least half soil, and soil kills carbide several times faster than oak does. Where we can, we scrape and hose the face down to clean wood before grinding. Where we cannot, the quote carries that. Anybody pricing a tipped plate at the same rate as a clean stump has not been out to look at it.

There is a decision to make on the crater as well. Left open it collects water and, in bottom ground, keeps collecting it. Filled with grindings alone it will sink for two years. What actually holds is the plate's own soil put back in layers with the chip mixed through it.

Creek bottom, hill ground, and the difference between them

Dixon Creek is one of the four named streams feeding the Cumberland from the north side of this county, and the land beside it behaves accordingly. The bottom parcels are two and three acres of soft alluvium carrying sycamore and box elder - quick wood, poor footing. Step up the hill and it turns into white oak, hickory and cedar on ground that will hold a machine any month of the year.

We schedule the two differently. Hill work goes straight on the calendar. Bottom work waits for a dry run of days. Highway 25 East and Old Highway 25 are the way in to all of it, and the last stretch of most drives out here is gravel with a creek crossing somewhere on it.

The county line runs right along the road

Addresses on Dixon Creek Road carry Dixon Springs mailing addresses in the 37057 zip, which tells you the boundary between Trousdale and Smith runs through here. It confuses people about who to call over a tree in the right-of-way, and about which office holds their parcel record.

For the Trousdale side the assessor sits at 328 Broadway, and the map itself is held on the state's viewer, not a county one. None of that matters for grinding a stump on your own ground. It matters a great deal if the stump is in a ditch line or on a boundary, and it is worth being certain whose it is before anybody starts a machine.