Stump Grinding & Stump Removal in Houston, TX

Grinding is the right call for 9 jobs in 10. The wheel chews the tree stump to 8 inches under grade, the roots stay and rot in three to five years, and you backfill and seed. Full removal means an excavator pulls the root ball out, which leaves a hole the size of a bathtub and a load of debris to truck at $600 to $1,200 a load. You need removal when a slab, a pool, a patio or a driveway is going where the tree was; roots under concrete decay and the slab settles. For a lawn, a fence line or a garden, grind it. Safe stump removal next to a foundation is a dig job, not a grind job, and we say which before we start.

Gumbo clay holds water because its plates swell shut when wet, so a ground-out hole in Harris County stays a puddle unless you backfill it with sand and chips mixed, not clay alone. We grind 8 inches below grade in clay and 10 to 12 in sand north of FM 1960, where the roots run deeper. Tallow roots run 3 feet down and sprout from any piece left, so we chase the big laterals 2 feet out. Surface roots the size of your arm get a surface root pass so the mower stops hitting them. In wet months the tracks rut a yard; on our jobs south of I-10 we lay plywood from the drive to the work from November to March. My father ran a dozer for Harris County Flood Control District, and he said the same thing about this clay. The soil you end up with drains better than what was there.

Ten or more stumps are a day job, not a per-piece job. A half-acre of mulched tallow and yaupon can leave 200 crowns at grade, and the fastest way through them is the skid steer with a grinding head, then the mulcher drum over the top. Root grinding on a whole lot runs a grid at 8 inches so a slab or sod can go anywhere. Tallow crowns need the extra pass; they sprout from any piece bigger than a thumb. Unsightly stumps along a fence or a property line are usually a half day, 8 to 12 of them. We specialize in whole-lot work and dig out only what the builder marks; the rest gets ground. Send a photo of the whole lot from the street and one from the back, and the count comes from that.

Grindings are wood chips mixed with dirt, about three times the volume of what stood there, and they shrink by half in a year as they decay. Three choices. We rake them into the hole, mound it 4 inches high and let it settle; by next summer it is level and you seed it. We spread them as mulch on a landscape bed, where they work like any wood mulch and keep the soil wet. Or we haul them, $600 to $1,200 a load, which nobody picks for one. Do not lay sod straight on fresh grindings; they saturate, go sour, and the sod dies. Rake them out, bring in two inches of topsoil, then sod or seed. Termite, beetle and pest worry is mostly talk, because grindings decay too fast to house a colony. An ant mound will show up in a week, though. Fire ants are competitive about fresh dirt. Mow it flat.