Stumps Left After Logging

The first problem is that you cannot see what you have. A tract logged two or three summers ago has regrowth head high over the stumps, and the stump count given over the phone is almost never right. Size drives the price far more than number does. Six small pine stumps and one mature water oak are the same sentence and a completely different job, because the oak's root plate comes out in one wide, shallow piece and generates far more spoil than the visible stump suggests. The second problem is what the stumps are. Pine, which is most of what gets logged north of Beaumont toward the Big Thicket, does not regrow from the stump, but it has a tap root that makes pulling harder and the stump itself takes years to break down. Hardwood cut in the bottomland along the Neches and Village Creek is the opposite: wide root plates, and in the case of Chinese tallow, aggressive regrowth from anything left at ground level. The third problem is the tops. Logging slash left in windrows holds water against the ground, hides the stumps you need to find, and feeds the tallow and yaupon that close the tract back in. Dealing with the slash and the stumps in one pass, while the equipment is already on the property, is materially cheaper than coming back for either one later.

Grinding chews a stump down below grade and leaves the root system in the ground to rot. It is quick, it works in tight spots near structures, drives and fence lines, and it leaves a hole full of grindings that settles over the following year or two. On a lawn or along a fence, grinding is usually the right answer and we will say so. On a logged tract it usually is not. If the ground is going back to pasture or hay, or if anything is going to be built on it, the stump needs to come out with its root plate. Grinding leaves the plate to rot, the ground settles over that spot for years, and with tallow and yaupon it is only a postponement, because both regrow from the roots as a matter of course. Pulling is done with an excavator and a thumb. The thumb is what matters, because it lets the machine grip the root plate, work it loose and set it where it is going. Pushing stumps with a dozer blade snaps them at the collar and leaves the plate in the ground, which is exactly the outcome you were paying to avoid. A stump broken at the collar gives you the settlement and the regrowth anyway.

A pulled stump of any size leaves a void, and on Beaumont clay a void that is raked over instead of filled becomes a permanently soft wet spot. The clay does not drain, so the hole fills with the next rain and stays full, and a tract with two hundred of those is worse ground than it was with the stumps in it. Every hole gets backfilled with suitable material and compacted rather than raked over. Where the ground is going back to pasture we dress and seed it so you get usable ground rather than a scar. Where the hole sits in the footprint of something being built, it gets filled to the same standard as a building pad. Timing matters more here than most people expect. Pulling stumps on saturated clay makes a mess, the holes fill with water immediately, and backfill placed into a wet void will not compact. Late summer through fall is the better ground for this work across Jefferson, Hardin and Orange counties. In a wet spring the honest advice is often to wait, and we would rather say that than tear up a tract to keep a schedule.

Stumps and root balls are bulky, they do not compact, and they cannot be buried on site, whatever anybody tells you. A stump under fill rots, and as it rots it shrinks, so the ground over it drops, often years later and usually under the barn or the drive that went in on top. It also causes problems if the property is ever developed or sold. We will not bury stumps even if asked. The legal endings are grinding into mulch, burning where the county allows it, or hauling off. Burning is governed by TCEQ outdoor burning rules on top of whatever burn ban is active in your county at the time, and burn bans move through the year. The county's status on the day is checked, not assumed from last month. The ending is picked before the first stump comes out, because a stump headed for the grinder is handled differently from one headed for a burn pile or a truck.

Not every stump field came from a logging contract. After Harvey and Imelda, and after Rita before them, a great deal of storm-felled timber across this region was cut off at the stump so the trunks could be moved, and the stumps were left. That ground has the same problem as a logged tract, often with a worse twist: a storm-thrown tree that was cut free may have left its root plate tipped half out of the ground with a hole under it that has been holding water ever since. Those stumps come out the same way, but the walk matters more. A tipped root plate is a void that has already been filling with water and silt, and the fix is the same backfill and compaction, just with more material than a clean pull would need.