What to Do When a Tree Wasn’t Grounded Right | Tips from Your Fort Worth, TX Stump Grinding Tree Service

Photo By Maria Evseyeva at Shutterstock

Fort Worth, TX home owners may find hiring a stump grinding tree service to be a wasteful expense, but dealing with the aftermath of a tree stump improperly ground can be a bigger hassle than simply hiring a service in the first place. Home owners will find the greatest difficulty in dealing with the roots, the sprouts, the left-over stump, following up with tree care, and potentially damaging city property. To best deal with the aftermath of an improperly ground stump, consider the following tips before doing anything hasty.

Stump Grinding vs Removal:

A stump grinding tree service will grind the stump down to chips with a stump grinder, then treat the ground so the roots don’t continue to grow, or sprout into a new tree. The roots ideally would decay naturally, or die from specific herbicides applied by the stump grinding tree service. On the flip side, stump removal focuses on digging up the landscape, and removing the stump, root ball, and any other parts of the tree that are in the ground. In the event you don’t want your landscaping disturbed, and you don’t want to pay extra to remove the entire tree, a stump grinding tree service will go out and do a professional job of preventing further growth, as well as protecting the surrounding landscape while allowing other plants like grass and flowers to still grow there.

Dealing with the Root System:

In the event a tree has to be cut down, and the stump ground down into mulch, the surrounding area may still hold a root system that can grow an entire tree again. In the case of Fort Worth, TX, trees capable of surviving drought are common, unfortunately, when these trees are ground down, the taproots around these trees reach farther than you’d think, sometimes reaching to the edges, and beyond your property. To properly deal with these kinds of roots without disturbing your landscaping, you have to exhaust the root’s nutrient supply by cutting any new growths you expect to be from the tree, this will eventually cause the roots to dry out, and decay into the earth naturally. You can also hire a stump grinding tree service to come out, and grind a foot or two below the surface of the ground where the stump originally was, where most of the nutrients of a tree are kept. Killing the main mass of root beneath the tree stump should help counteract a still living root system. If you’re on a time budget however, or aren’t willing to keep track of every single sprout from a tree root, you can also employ glyphosate and triclopyr, which are sold under various trade names. Applying these to tree roots, and to a stump prior to grinding it, for that matter, can help combat the growing roots on your property.

Recycling the Stump:

Unsurprisingly, grinding down larger tree stumps can create an awful lot of waste, in the form of wood chips and other plant matter. A stump grinding tree service may haul away the material after doing a job, but for Fort Worth, TX residents who still have the leftovers of a large tree stump, they can take a number of steps to cleaning up their lawn and reusing the chips. After racking up the leftover wood chips and other plant matter from around your property, you can elect to mulch them into fertilizer to keep the rest of your lawn’s plants healthy and growing. The city of Fort Worth, TX also has a yard trimming collecting service that takes up to forty pounds of plant matter (in this case wood shavings and roots) and recycle it to make their own mulch.

Professional Tree Care:

In the event you grind down or remove your stump, either due to the tree becoming too old or struck by lightning, you may want to plant a tree in the same spot just to save time. In the event that you do this though, you have to take certain steps to make sure you don’t have to call out the stump grinding tree service a second time, first off, if you’ve already taken care of the tree roots from the previous stump, your new sapling is ready to be planted in that soil. With the tree roots still present, or recently removed, however, it’s possible the tree root still there could sap moisture and nutrients from the soil before the sapling gets a chance to grow. It’s best to clear out roots from an area at least three times the size of the root ball of the new tree. If you’ve got a new tree, for example, with a 1-foot root ball, it’d be best to have at least a 3-foot root free zone. Make sure that the topsoil is raised higher than ground level to let the tree settle during the planting process. If you take all these steps, the next time you call a stump grinding tree service, the stump they grind will be a lot bigger and healthier for all the work you do.

Check with Your City:

The city of Fort Worth, TX has gas and water lines crossing a number of properties, and even though the roots in Texas tend to be wider than they are deep, removing or grinding a tree stump down can inadvertently cause thousands in damages for the city to repair, all of which you will be liable for. Always remember to hire a proper stump grinding tree service before you do any landscaping work yourself.

In Conclusion:

A good stump grinding tree service is the cornerstone to a healthy property, as it prevents a trees roots from harming the other plants on your property after removing it from your property. Always remember to consult S&P Tree Service before doing any work you’re unfamiliar with yourself.