Grinding a Palm Stump Is Different From an Oak Stump

A queen palm comes out because of fusarium, a sabal gets moved for a driveway, a Washingtonia gets taken down after it outgrows the lot. What is left is a stump that does not look like much. Then it sits there for five years, because palm stumps rot slowly and sprout nothing, and everyone forgets about it until somebody wants to plant there.

Palm stumps are a different material from hardwood stumps, and it changes how we grind them and what you get afterward.

What a palm trunk actually is

Palms are not trees in the botanical sense. They are giant grasses. A palm trunk has no bark, no annual rings, no heartwood. It is a dense bundle of fibers in a soft matrix, and it is wet: a live palm trunk holds a great deal of water.

Under the ground, a palm has no taproot and no big structural roots. It has thousands of thin, uniform roots coming off the base of the trunk in a mass called the root initiation zone. The result is a stump that is fibrous and stringy above ground and a dense ball of pencil-sized roots below.

How that changes the grinding

It is slower than it looks. The fibers do not chip cleanly the way oak does. The cutter wheel tends to shred and pull rather than cut, and wet palm fiber packs into the wheel. A palm stump that looks like it should take twenty minutes often takes longer than an oak stump of the same diameter.

It makes a mess of a different kind. Oak grinding produces wood chips. Palm grinding produces a wet, stringy mulch that looks like shredded coconut husk and holds a lot of water. There is more volume than people expect.

The root ball is the real job. To get a plantable spot, the root initiation zone below the trunk has to be ground out, not just the trunk section at the surface. That means grinding wider and deeper than the trunk diameter would suggest, especially on a sabal or a large Washingtonia.

Palm stumps do not resprout. Unlike oaks and camphor, a palm has one growing point at the top of the trunk, and once that is gone the plant is dead. There will be no suckers. On the other hand, a clumping palm (areca, some date palms) can push new shoots from the base, and those need the base ground out.

The material afterward

Palm grindings are not good mulch. They are wet, they mat, they decay slowly and they can smell as they break down. We recommend hauling them off rather than spreading them in beds. Oak chips are a different story, as we covered in What to Do With the Pile After a Stump Is Ground.

The hole is also wetter than an oak hole, because the trunk fibers held water and the sandy soil under a palm is usually loose. Expect settling. If you are going to sod or plant, the grindings come out and clean fill goes in.

Replanting where a palm stood

The good news: a palm stump is one of the easiest to replant near, because the decaying root ball is fine-textured and does not leave the big voids and buried logs that a hardwood stump does. Once the grindings are removed and the hole is filled, you can plant another palm or a shrub in the same spot.

The caution: if the palm was removed because of a disease, do not plant the same species there. Fusarium wilt, which kills queen palms and Canary Island date palms, persists in the soil. Ganoderma butt rot, which kills many species, also persists. Lethal bronzing is insect-vectored and does not live in the stump, but the site is still one where palms have died. We wrote about these in Palm Diseases in Volusia County. A replacement of a different genus, or a non-palm, is the safe move.

Leaving a palm stump

If the stump is out of the way, leaving it is a defensible choice. It will not sprout. It will decay slowly over years, and in the meantime it is a habitat for insects and eventually a soft, spongy mass that collapses inward. It will also attract palmetto weevils, which are drawn to stressed and dying palm tissue, and those weevils go on to attack healthy palms nearby. That is the one real argument for grinding a palm stump you would otherwise ignore.

We covered the general case in Why Leaving the Stump Costs You More Than Grinding It.

Frequently asked questions

Does a palm stump cost more to grind than an oak stump?

Often, for the same diameter, because it takes longer and produces more material to remove. Our stump grinding page covers what drives the number. We quote after seeing it.

Can I dig a palm stump out myself?

A small one, yes. The root ball is shallow and not woody, and a sabal that was planted recently can be dug with a shovel and a lot of effort. A mature one is a machine job.

Will the palm grow back from the stump?

Solitary palms (sabal, queen, Washingtonia, date, royal) will not. Clumping palms can. If you are seeing shoots, it was a clumping species and the base needs to be ground.

How deep do you grind a palm stump?

Deep enough to remove the root initiation zone, which is usually somewhat deeper than a hardwood stump of the same size. If you tell us you plan to replant in the spot, we grind for that.

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ArboristRX removes palms and grinds palm stumps across Edgewater, New Smyrna Beach, Port Orange, Oak Hill and Volusia County. Call (386) 444-5959.