August 14, 2026 · 6 min read

After the Grind: What to Do With the Hole, the Chips, and the Roots

Grinding a stump takes about twenty minutes. What most people are actually unsure about is the next part: you’re left with a mound of damp wood chips sitting over a shallow bowl, and nobody explained what to do with it.

Here’s the whole aftermath, in order — the chips, the hole, the grass, the roots, and the settling you’ll see months from now. Mid-August is a good time to be reading this in Evansville, because the best cool-season grass seeding window of the year opens right about now.

What the machine actually leaves behind

A stump grinder chips the stump and the root flare down below grade — typically 4 to 8 inches under the surrounding soil line, deeper if you asked for it so you can replant or lay sod. It does not dig anything out. The wood that used to be the stump is now a pile of chips mixed with soil, sitting on top of and inside the hole it came from.

That mound looks bigger than the stump did, and that surprises people every time. Ground wood fluffs up to roughly twice the volume of the solid stump, so a modest 20-inch stump can leave a mound a couple of feet across and a foot high. It settles fast once it starts to break down.

The chips: keep them, but put them somewhere useful

Grindings make good free mulch, and hauling them off is an add-on cost — so most Evansville homeowners keep them. Spread the excess 2 to 3 inches deep around landscape beds, along a fence line, or on a garden path. Fresh chips are coarse and hold moisture well through the back half of an Indiana summer.

Two cautions. First, don’t pile them against tree trunks or your house siding — mulch volcanoes rot bark, and wood held against a foundation is an invitation you don’t need to send. Second, don’t till them into a vegetable bed. As wood decomposes, the microbes doing the work pull nitrogen out of the surrounding soil, and anything planted directly into fresh grindings comes up yellow and stunted. On top of the soil as mulch: great. Mixed into it as a growing medium: not yet.

• Mulch beds and paths — 2–3 inches deep, kept off trunks and siding
• Fill low spots in the yard, then cap with topsoil before seeding
• Compost pile — chips are excellent "brown" material
• Don’t use them as planting soil for a year or more

Filling the hole the right way

If you want lawn back over the spot, filling it with the chips alone is the mistake to avoid. They break down over a year or two, and the hole reappears — usually right after you’ve seeded it.

Rake most of the grindings off to use as mulch, leave a few inches in the bottom of the hole, and backfill the rest with screened topsoil. Mound the fill 2 to 4 inches above grade and tamp it down with your foot or the back of a rake, because it will settle. Water it in once to collapse the air pockets, then top it off again in a couple of weeks when the low spot shows up.

Seeding grass over a ground stump

Once you have real topsoil in the hole, grass is straightforward. In the Evansville area we’re on cool-season lawns — tall fescue and bluegrass — and the best seeding window of the year runs from roughly mid-August through late September. Soil is still warm enough for fast germination, nights are cooling off, and the seedlings get a full fall plus a spring to root before summer tests them.

Rake the topsoil smooth, seed it a little heavier than you think you need, rake it in lightly, and keep the surface damp for two to three weeks. If you seed a stump patch in June instead, plan on watering it daily and expect a thinner stand.

Can you plant a new tree in the same spot?

Not exactly in the same hole, and this is the question we get most. Even a deep grind leaves the entire root system in the ground — a mature tree’s roots run out well past the drip line and go nowhere for years. A new tree planted right into that spot fights decaying wood, poor drainage, and no room to establish.

The practical answer is to offset the new tree 3 to 6 feet from the old stump, which is far enough to find undisturbed soil. If it has to go in the exact spot — a formal row, a specific shade line — have the grinder go extra deep, then excavate and replace that volume with real soil, and accept that you’ve made the job bigger. Waiting a year and offsetting is cheaper and works better.

The roots that are still down there

Underground roots simply decompose. Depending on species and how wet the ground stays, expect several years for a big maple or oak root system to break down enough that you’d never know — and you may see the lawn sink slightly along the old root runs as it happens. That settling is normal; topdress it with soil and reseed.

The roots that do need attention are the ones you can see. Silver maples in particular leave ropes of surface root snaking across the lawn, and those don’t disappear when the stump does — they have to be ground out separately if they’re in the way of a mower. Same goes for suckering species: cut a Bradford pear or a mulberry off at grade and leave live roots, and you’ll get a thicket of shoots next spring. Grinding the stump and flare below grade is what actually stops the regrowth.

Mushrooms, sinking, and other normal-looking alarms

Two things show up afterward that look like problems and usually aren’t. Mushrooms sprouting out of the fill are just fungi eating the buried wood — that’s the decomposition you want, and they disappear when the food runs out. Keep pets and kids away from them and mow them off if you don’t like the look.

A depression that opens up months later is the same story: buried wood lost volume. Add topsoil, tamp, reseed. Both are worth expecting so you don’t assume something went wrong.

One genuine safety item before you dig any of this yourself: call 811 a couple of days ahead to have utilities marked. Gas, cable, and irrigation lines are shallower than people expect, especially on the Evansville side of older neighborhoods, and a shovel finds them the hard way.

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