Land clearing tips, please.

rlee6 · Apr 4, 2005

I started talking to land clearing folks. Apparently, it is much more than my oversimplified version, which is pushing with a big dozer with rake. If anyone has experience, please help me.

What I am hearing is something like this. With a backhoe, scoop out a small patch of the brush (waist height cabbage palms ubiquitous in Florida). Then lift it with a loader (or tractor) with a root rake and shake out dirt. Move to a burn pile. Repeat this as many times as necessary. What makes the matter complicated is that the burn pile must be 150' away from any structure. Cost if hired: upto $2000 an acre.

I also called an equipment rental place. They said a loader with root rake is all I need to clear cabbage palm fields. $400 daily, $1400 weekly + $150 delivery & pickup + 20% insurance & tax + diesel (I supply)

Specific questions are:
1) What do I need? Backhoe and loader? Just a loader?
2) Since the cabbage palms are so thick, unless I can pile them up high, they may take up a larger area out of soil than in the soil. What is the key to a high pile? Loader height? Is this a high skill job? Can I do it?

I need to clear about 3 to 5 acres.

OkeeDon · Apr 4, 2005

We used an industrial-size tractor-loader-backhoe equipped with a root rake. We removed pepper trees and wild grape vine. We left all the native species including Sabal Palm, Cabbage Palm, Palmetto, Live Oak, Laurel Oak, Red Maple, Slash Pine and Wax Myrtle. If it was noxious and spreading, we got it out, everything else stayed. This takes a lot longer and was a lot fussier than clearing everything.

We did have to take a few palms and pines where they were going to interfere with the construction. We never used the backhoe for anything except pulling the tractor out of a couple of low places when it got stuck. The root rake handled everything. We could shake the dirt off the pepper tree roots, and the occasional palm tree we had to remove, but there is no practical way to get the dirt out of the wild grape vine roots -- the stuff rolls up like a carpet, taking the dirt with it. It's so densely matted that it will not release the dirt.

As a result, our stuff would not burn, no matter how many times we tried and what tricks we pulled (lots of diesel fuel, air blowers, etc). When the dry season started and the Div of Forestry stopped allowing burn permits, we moved everything to one big pile, then buried it with a huge excavator/track hoe.

You can see the clearing here: Okeechobee Land Clearing Click on the pictures to view them in larger size.

There are some other albums in the gallery that show the debris being buried, pond being dug, etc.

rlee6 · Apr 4, 2005

Thank you , Don. I remember browsing through your photos. What I asked about previously in serveral posts (well, power, barn, driveway, etc) I am doing now. Since you are just next county, I am sure I can borrow from your experience (loader with root rake) and it shoud work. My field is almost all cabbage palms of the same height. Several oaks.

OkeeDon · Apr 5, 2005

Good luck. I wish I was that far along. I have fence, driveway, culvert, pond, raised building areas, and well finished, but I can't do the barn, yet. I wanted to do the barn next, but our county and our zoning (rural residential) requires a house before any auxilliary buildings. Our house plans are now at an architect for final suggestions, working drawings and engineering. He's backed up, so that process will probably take several months. Once we pull a permit for a house, we can also pull a permit for the barn and get temporary electric.

We also have some drainage issues that are going to take some thought to solve, but the construction areas, driveway/road and pond area are high and dry. I suspect I'm going to be working on drainage for several years to come.

aardvark · Apr 5, 2005

I don't know how deep the Cabbage Palms are rooted, but I suspect a large enough tractor would just push them over with a loader bucket. I'm assuming the soil in your area is just as sandy as our soil down here. My BX23 will push over trees in the sandy soild that are alot bigger than I would have ever thought possible. I think it's mostly the sandy soild, and the BX would have problems in other geographic areas.

Alternateively, you may be able to sell them if you have alot of them. Maybe call some nurseries and see if they are interested in buying them, or maybe even just giving them away on the chance the nursery would be willing to remove them. I don't know how desirable Cabbage Palms are, but down here Royal Palms and some of the others are big bucks, and a nursery will often come over and remove one for free if you let them take the tree with them. At least then it's less work for you. I have several Cabbage Palms in my yard, wouldn't mind having a few more that are strategically placed.

The other problem I'm finding, is that I can't get a burn permit here, and now I have a bunch of root balls that are too big for me to put out by the road for pickup, and too small to interest the mulch grinders to come get. Looks like I'll have to spend some money on a stump grinder or a dumpster rental.

rlee6 · Apr 6, 2005

That's very encouraging. The previous owner used a dozer and pushed a pretty good size of cabbage palm patch in one big roll, including soil and everything. That also tells me that the roots are not that deep, or at least, easy to remove. I am inclined to do the job myself.

One more question: who issues burn permit? county or state?

Don,
No, I am not ahead of you. What I wanted to say was that I was calling contractors to get those done.

By the way, do you mean you have a wet area on your property? Can you drain wet area and convert it to dry? I also have some wet spots and would like to know how to.

aardvark · Apr 6, 2005

In unincorporated Palm Beach County the burn permits are issued by the fire department. That's probably a good place to start in your area as well.

OkeeDon · Apr 6, 2005

Florida Division of Forestry. My son-in-law is a fireman/medic for the Okeechobee County fire department, and he has to get his burn permit from the Div of Forestry. You apply for a property ID number, then you call each morning you want to burn and find out if you will be permitted to do so that day. If it's been too dry or the winds are too high, they will deny that day's burning. You have to have some sort of loader on site when you burn; my little TC18 with FEL is good enough. One of our burn piles got away from us into some dry grass; I was able to drag across it with the FEL and put it out in less than 90 seconds. We usually keep the FEL bucket full of dirt for quick action. There are some strict rules about distance to buildings and distance to highway. In our case, the Div of Forestry sent out a ranger to see where our burn piles were going to be, and to verify the loader, before they issued us the property ID. He was really nice, and made some helpful recommendations.

Since then, we have constructed a 3-sided "semi-ring of dirt" for a permanent burn pile. The dirt is banked about 6' high on 3 sides and is open on one side for easy "refueling". The burn pile is about 20' x 20' inside the banks. The open side is not visible from the road or from the house, so the banks look like a landscape feature, and we can load up the pile over time without having it look bad. It's about 150' from anything. Combined with the fact that Doug is a fireman and has trained with the Forestry guys, they love us and will let us burn when others are denied. We saved a bundle by burning the combustible stuff from hurricane damage instead of paying landfill fees.

OkeeDon · Apr 6, 2005

<font color="blue">" By the way, do you mean you have a wet area on your property? Can you drain wet area and convert it to dry?"</font>

We have areas that can flood under the right combination of circumstances. There has to be LOTS of rain, the water table has to be fairly high, and a flood gate on the county drainage system has to be closed.

Eventually, all of our drainage (and most of yours, too, from North of us) goes into Lake Okeechobee. When the lake gets too full, they open flood gates and dump the fresh water into the brackish estuaries on the East and West coasts of Florida, into the St. Lucie River in the East and the Caloosahatchie River in the West. The fresh water dumps play havoc with the ecology of the brackish estuaries, and the environmentalists on the coasts scream bloody blue murder.

This is all compounded by the work the Corps of Engineers did many years ago when they "channelized" the Kissimmee River and let all of the Northern drainage flow straight into the lake. As you probably know, they're in the midst of a hugely expensive and long campaign to restore the oxbows and natural wetlands to the Kissimmee, which will help alleviate some of the problems.

Anyhoo, the point of all that is that when there is a lot of rain, they try to prevent the lake from getting too high, which in turn means that they won't have to dump as much fresh water out either side of the lake. All of the drainage in the county flows through a series of gates before it gets to the lake. In our case, the drainage ditches along side State Road 70 flow to a slough (pronounced "slew", and sort of a wide, shallow, swampy stream), and thence to the lake. There is a gate on the slough.

If that gate is closed, the highway ditch backs up, and there is no place for the runoff from my property to go. If there is enough rain, the highway ditch gets about 6" higher than many areas on my property, and I get that much flooding. The flooding will persist until they open the flood gate. Two years ago, it lasted two months! Right after the hurricanes, they weren't as concerned with the environmentalists on the coasts and they dumped as much water as they could as quickly as they could, and the flooding lasted only about 2 days after each storm.

The water all has to go somewhere -- it's a delicate dance between storing it on my property (sometimes it seems like it'sall of the water /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif), allowing it to go into the lake, and/or dumping it into the estuaries.

There are only two fool-proof solutions for me. (1) Dynamite the flood gate. (2) Bring in enough fill to raise my entire property about 1 foot. That would be about 8,000 or so cubic yards, and it would kill a lot of the native landscaping, so that isn't going to happen. I'm just going to have to live with a certain amount of flooding when the gate is closed. When the flood gate is open, my entire property is nicely dry within hours after a storm -- there are no actual permanent wetland areas.

I do have some intermediate solutions to control areas which are more prone to flooding than others. Most of it was created when I raised the driveway high enough to stay dry for the entire length of the property; about 800'. The area on the "short" side of the property cannot drain over the road. In the attached rough drawing of my site plan, it's the area at the bottom of the property, below the dashed lines showing the driveway. I'm going to create some drainage swales and some pipes under the driveway to transfer the water to the side where it will continue to drain. Some of the areas will be built up a little. I expect the work to take several years at my current speed. We'll never be able to prevent all the flooding, but we can make it easier to live with it.