The winter grind.......

Harold grinding a stump on #14

One of our larger jobs in the early spring is grinding all stumps from the winter tree work we performed and prepping those areas for soil, and either sod or seed, depending on their location on the golf course. 



Quite the pile of soil and grindings

Above you can see Harold using our grinder on an oak stump along #14.  This stump grinder makes fairly quick work of most wood types, except for the hardwoods like locust.  The picture to the right shows what is left for the staff to remove once grinding is complete.  It is important to remove as much of this vegetative material so that the sod or grass seed that will take its place will grow well.  As you can imagine, soil that has a large amount of wood shavings has a much lower nutrient value to turf than topsoil!  These grindings and soil are hauled to our compost pile, where they can become useful material again after decomposition.



 Any chance we get, we utilize the equipment available to make our job more efficient.  The pictures below show our removal process.  We use two front end loader buckets to sweep the majority of the grindings into the truck.  Even though this speeds the clean-up process, there is still a fair amount of hand work to make sure the area is fully prepped for topsoil fill.  Our goal is to remove and fill all these holes before activity on the golf course picks up steam, to minimize the impact during play. 

 

Ryan