Pine and Eastern Red Cedar Stump Grinding in Ashland City
Almost nothing we grind under the heading of pine around here is a pine. It is fencerow red cedar or a 1970s planted white pine, and the two behave nothing alike on a machine.
There Is No Loblolly Here
Southern yellow pine, the loblolly and shortleaf that people picture when they say pine stump, is a plantation tree of West Tennessee and the Cumberland Plateau. It is not what grew up in Cheatham County and it is almost certainly not what is standing in your yard. When somebody in Ashland City calls about a pine, it is one of three things.
Eastern red cedar, which is really a juniper, is the most common by a wide margin. It stands in the old pasture fencerows the newer county plats were cut out of, the fields off Caldwell Road and the Bearwallow Road blocks, and it clings to the thin limestone shoulders above the river where nothing else holds.
Second is eastern white pine, planted deliberately as screening along the back lines of Stratton Hills and Spanish Trails lots in the 1970s and now sixty feet tall and dropping limbs. Third is Virginia pine, which comes back on its own along abandoned field margins and rarely gets large. Which one you have changes the job, so it is worth working out before you call.
Cedar Is Not a Pine and Does Not Grind Like One
Red cedar carries no pitch worth mentioning. The smell is aromatic oil rather than resin and it will not gum a wheel. What it does have is a fluted trunk. A cedar that tapes eighteen inches across is really a bundle of ridges and deep grooves with bark folded down into them, so the tape understates how much wood is actually there and the wheel wants to skate off the high spots instead of biting.
The wood itself is soft and stringy rather than hard, so once the operator has it under control it cuts quickly, but it throws long fibrous shreds instead of chips. The dust is fine, red and staining. On a light concrete drive or a pale paver walk it leaves a rust-coloured wash that wants hosing off the same afternoon, not next weekend.
The root system is shallow and wide, and on a limestone shoulder it is wrapped over the rock rather than growing into it, which means the roots come out in sheets.
A Dead Cedar Stump Will Still Be There in 2046
This is the practical divide between the cedars and everything else in this county. Red cedar heartwood is naturally rot-resistant, which is exactly why every old fence post around here is cedar, so a cedar stump does not soften and quietly disappear the way a box elder does. We grind cedar stumps that were cut in the early 2000s and are still hard the whole way through, sitting in a lawn somebody has mowed around for twenty years.
Willow, box elder and silver maple in wet ground will be punky in four or five years and mostly gone in ten. A cedar, a black locust or an osage orange will not be. If you are weighing up grinding now against waiting it out, the species is the entire answer, and with cedar waiting it out is not a plan.
White pine sits between the two. It does rot, but the resin-soaked heartwood and the thick central root hold on long after the sapwood has gone soft.
White Pine Pitch Is the Part That Slows Us Down
Where cedar is fast and dirty, white pine is fast and sticky. Fresh resin loads the pockets behind the teeth and builds a tarry collar around the wheel that has to be scraped off partway through anything over about twenty inches. Once it is loaded the wheel stops throwing cleanly and starts smearing, and the operator is stopping to clean rather than cutting.
The chips behave differently too. Pine spoil goes down light and fibrous and then mats into a wet felt that sheds water instead of draining, so a pine mound left sitting on a lawn kills the grass under it faster than a hardwood mound does.
And the sap stains. On a driveway, a patio or a brick step it sets within a day or two and becomes a real problem after that. Where a white pine stump is within a few feet of concrete, cover goes down before the machine starts. That is cheap. The alternative is not.
Softwood jobs, species by species
- Red cedar: fluted trunk, so a tape measurement reads narrower than the wood really is
- Red cedar: fine red dust that stains light concrete, so hose the drive the same day
- Red cedar: rot-resistant heartwood, meaning a twenty-year-old stump is as hard as a fresh one
- White pine: pitch on the wheel forces a cleaning stop midway through anything sizeable
- White pine: sap sets on a driveway within a day or two, so cover goes down first
- Virginia pine: usually small, usually several at once, usually on an old field edge
- All three: light fibrous spoil that mats down and smothers grass wherever it is left mounded
Common Questions
The tree service called it a cedar and the county calls it a juniper. Which is right?
Both. Eastern red cedar is Juniperus virginiana, a juniper carrying a common name from the settlers. The reason it matters on a quote is that people hear cedar, think pine, and expect the sticky-resin problems and the pricing that go with a true pine. A cedar grinds faster and dirtier than a pine, and it will still be solid decades after a pine stump has rotted away.
Six of the white pines along my back line died within about two years of each other. Why?
Eastern white pine is near the southern edge of what it can tolerate here. It was planted heavily as screening in the seventies on hot open lot lines with clay underneath, and a row that age tends to go together once drought and bark beetles find it. Grinding a line of them is priced on total inches across the row rather than per stump, and the roots between neighbouring trees are often grafted together.
Can I use the cedar chips as mulch?
On a path or a rough area, yes, and the smell is pleasant for a few weeks. On a planting bed, use them thin and only on the surface. Cedar spoil is stringy, it knits into a mat that sheds rain rather than letting it through, and like all grinding spoil it is carrying soil and whatever was in that soil. Keep it off the crowns of anything you want to survive the winter.
The pine stump is right against my sidewalk. Anything I should do first?
Move anything you care about within about thirty feet, then leave the concrete to us. We lay cover over walks, drives and any pale masonry within throwing distance before starting, because pine sap and grinding grit together mark a light surface quickly and neither one washes off easily once it has had a day in the sun. If the walk is public frontage, tell us in advance so we can plan where the discharge goes.