Best gardening steps

Sometimes it's either desirable or necessary to cut a tree down. This is a dangerous and involved project, so many homeowners recruit a professional company for the job. Not all service providers handle stump removal when they fell trees. Fortunately, there are many contractors in the Spring Hill Florida area who do, if you don't want to handle this time-consuming task yourself.

Trees are beautiful ornaments, are good for the planet's air quality, and provide homes for wildlife. However, they also sometimes pose problems for homeowners. Perhaps you want to have a bigger yard or pasture and need to push back encroaching vegetation. Maybe your kids want more off-road trails, or you'd like to open up a view. Trees also get old, diseased, or damaged and become hazards to your home, cars, and family. They also may extend their roots into your drain filed or under your water lines.

Even if trunks are small enough that you feel comfortable cutting them yourself, the stumps remain. They can trip you up, be a pain to mow around, ruin your mower blades, and mar your landscape design. Heavy equipment can yank them out or dig them up, but if you have less than a mini-forest of them the cost is prohibitive. You also may not want to tear up the yard just to make it look better.

Many pros advertise that they work on stumps large or small. Free estimates are standard in the industry, so you'll know the cost of getting rid of these eye-sores and lawn hazards. When getting an estimate, make sure that removing the debris and filling in the hole is included. Of course, you may get a lower price by doing these clean-up tasks yourself.

Many contractors offer grinding to remove both the upper parts of the tree base and the roots. You can actually buy a grinder, if you think you'll continue to face this sort of problem. However, most homeowners will only need help once in a blue moon, so buying, maintaining, and housing a personal grinder may not make sense.

There's another approach that you'll also find online. This involves letting stumps 'season' (the beginning of the rotting process) for a year, boring holes in them, and pouring a chemical decomposing agent into the holes. This takes time but once the wood is porous and soft, you can use an ax to break it up and take it away.

You may not need to remove underground roots, but grinding can do that, as well. You yourself can dig around the stump to expose roots which you then cut. Eventually you'll find the taproot, and the whole root ball can be pulled out. Another way to attack roots is to soak them with kerosene - for a few days, not minutes - and them set them on fire. They'll slowly smolder away. A permit may be required to burn stumps and roots.

Chemicals include potassium nitrate; home wood-decomposing agents include buttermilk. You can also gradually burn wood away with hot charcoal left over from your backyard grilling. To make your life easier, call a professional tree service provider or stump grinding company in the Spring Hill Florida area.