Stump Grinding in Marong, Township Blocks and Paddocks

Drive the back roads around Marong and you will see them: lines of grey cypress and pine stumps along fence lines where a windbreak was felled years ago and nobody dealt with what was left. They snag the slasher and stop a new fence going in straight. Stump grinding in Marong is largely about those rows, plus red gum and box stumps on lifestyle blocks and the single backyard stump on an estate lot that is in the way of a shed slab.

Grinding out an old windbreak row

Cypress and radiata pine were the windbreak trees of choice on the farms west of Bendigo for most of last century, and their stumps behave differently from a gum's. A cypress stump is wide and fairly soft with a shallow, spreading root plate, so it grinds quickly but its surface roots run a long way along the row. A pine stump is harder and full of resin, and the older and drier it is, the more it has cracked, which the grinder likes. A red gum stump is the hard one: dense, often buttressed, with roots that go down as well as out, so it takes longer than either conifer.

The grinder is a tracked machine with a toothed wheel on an arm. It fits through a farm gate and works along the row while a ground worker keeps the grindings raked back. On a typical Marong row the stumps go to around 200 to 300 millimetres below ground, enough to run a slasher or a disc over the line. If a new fence is going in exactly where the trees stood, or the paddock is going back into crop, we grind deeper along the line and chase the bigger lateral roots so a post driver or plough does not find them later.

What is left is a trench of grindings, the stump wood chipped fine and mixed with soil. There is always more of it than the stump, so on a farm it is levelled and left to rot, or pushed up with the mini loader for rough mulch under the replacement trees. The finer roots beyond the grinding zone rot over a few years without trouble.

Getting the ground back into use

A cypress or pine line can be fenced through and sown to pasture almost straight away once the grindings are levelled and topped with soil; grindings rob nitrogen as they break down, so seed sown into pure sawdust looks poor for a season. Replanting a tree straight into the old hole is the one thing we advise against: the soil is full of decaying wood, and a new tree does far better a couple of metres to the side. For a shed slab, a driveway or turf on the estate blocks, we grind deeper, remove the grindings and leave clean soil that can be compacted.

Local conditions in Marong that affect stump work

Ground is the main one. The heavier clay soils on the plains side of Bendigo hold water through winter, and a tracked grinder crossing a wet paddock leaves ruts for a season, so we do the big farm rows from late summer through autumn and keep winter work to house blocks and hardstand. Rock is rarely an issue in Marong the way it is on the quartz ridges closer to town. On the new estates the problem is the opposite: a stump in the back corner of a 650 square metre lot in Marong Run or Discover Marong is reached through a side gate past the meter box, so we bring the narrow machine and protect the paving. Older township blocks near the highway and Malone Park often have services in unexpected places, which we locate before grinding near a house. Stumps near Bullock Creek or on a rural living lot under an overlay are checked first in case the tree itself needed a permit, a question covered on the tree removal in Marong page.

What comes with stump grinding in Marong

Machine sizes and access widths are on the main stump grinding service page, and the rest of our work around the township is on the Marong suburb page. If the trees are still standing, tree lopping in Marong and hedge trimming in Marong are the alternatives. The same grinder does stump grinding in Maiden Gully, across Bendigo and down to Kangaroo Flat.

Stump grinding questions we get from Marong