Stump Grinding in Kountze, TX

Stump Grinding & Removal Services in Kountze, TX

On a hunting tract outside Kountze, stumps cost you in equipment and in time. A stump left in a food plot bends a disc or stops the tractor halfway across the plot. One left in a shooting lane is a hazard every time the lane gets mowed. And around the camp house, the stumps from trees taken down after the last storm are the things somebody trips over in the dark. Getting them out properly once beats working around them every season. The method depends on what each patch of ground is for, a plot, a lane or a camp yard, and the timing depends on the season you are working toward.

Kountze is Big Thicket country, and the headquarters of the national preserve sits right here. The tracts around town are timber, hunting ground and rural acreage, with loblolly pine on the uplands, white oak, water oak and sweetgum in the draws, and bottomland hardwoods along Village Creek and its tributaries. Much of this land has been through commercial forestry at least once, so old harvest stumps are common under the regrowth, along with the newer stumps from trees cut to open lanes and plots. Rita and Ike both took the tops out of pine across Hardin County, and Harvey and Imelda put Village Creek well out of its banks and loosened root plates in the bottoms. Every one of those storms left trees down on tracts that see people only a few weekends a year, and when the trees were finally cut up and moved, the stumps stayed. The soil is a help. Sandy loam on the uplands carries equipment more of the year than the coastal clay to the south, and stumps come out of it more easily. The bottoms are wetter, and they are often the best part of a hunting tract left exactly as they are. The preserve is a planning matter, not a detail. Big Thicket National Preserve is a set of units and corridors scattered through this country rather than one block, and plenty of private tracts share a line with one. Before stumps along a tract edge are pulled, we want to know where that line actually runs. The calendar runs everything here. Lanes are best cut and cleaned up in spring or early summer so the ground settles and the deer settle with it. Plots need preparing before a late summer planting, and lime in this acidic soil wants time to work. Stumps in either belong at the front of that schedule, not in October.

In a food plot, the stumps should be pulled. The excavator with a thumb takes each one out with its root plate, the holes are backfilled and compacted, and the plot is left level enough to disc and plant without the tractor finding a soft hole or a stump top. Grinding is an option where a plot sits over old pine stumps that will not resprout, provided they are ground well below the depth the disc works. In a shooting lane, the answer depends on how the lane is kept. A lane that gets mowed needs stumps ground low or pulled so the mower runs clean. A lane that is only walked and glassed can live with low stumps, and the money is better spent elsewhere. We will tell you which you have. Around the camp house, the barn and the stands, it is grinding. The stumps there are often close to a cabin, a water line or a septic system, and grinding keeps the disturbance small. Public lines are located through 811 first, and private ones, the well line, the line to a feeder or a camp trailer, get pointed out at the walk. Where the camp yard is lawn, the chips come out and topsoil goes in, and we deliver it. The cost depends on the number and size of stumps, whether each is pulled or ground, how far the machine has to travel across the tract to reach them, how the holes are finished, and what happens to the material. Grouping every stump on the tract into one trip spreads the cost of getting the equipment there. Stump work at the camp often runs into other work on the tract: lane cutting, plot preparation, an access road that has washed. The same machines handle those on the same trip. Material is mulched, hauled off or burned where Hardin County allows it, with TCEQ outdoor burning rules and any active burn ban checked first. Stumps are never buried in a plot.