Four write-ups on the things that decide what a job costs and whether it holds. No sales pitch in them. Just what we have learned working sand, palmetto and scrub across five Central Florida counties.
The single most expensive decision people get wrong. What each machine actually does to the ground, what it leaves behind, and how to pick by what you’re going to do with the lot.
Read it →Local groundWhy a palmetto lot that looks flat after mulching isn’t cleared, what lives underneath, and the wildlife rules that decide when work can start.
Read it →Before you cutCogongrass, Brazilian pepper, Chinese tallow and air potato. Which ones a machine makes worse, and why we wash down between sites.
Read it →SequenceThe order the work goes in, where people put steps in the wrong place, and what to have in hand before you call anybody.
Read it →Every one of these started as something Dewey was explaining to a caller for the tenth time.
Most of what goes wrong on a clearing job is decided before a machine ever shows up. Somebody buys mulching when they needed grubbing. Somebody clears a lot in September and spends the next two years fighting a grass that wasn’t there before. Somebody has a pad built on ground that was never stripped, and finds out about it when the slab cracks.
None of that’s exotic. It’s the ordinary result of not knowing what the machine does, and there’s no reason a property owner should be expected to know. So these are written the way we’d explain it standing on your lot. With the parts that are inconvenient for us left in.
Where a number comes from a source rather than from our own jobs, we say whose number it is. Where we don’t know, we say that too.
Photos of the lot answer more questions than any article will.
Send photosHalf the confusion on a clearing quote comes from two people using the same word to mean different things. These are what we mean by them.
| Term | What it means | What it’s not |
|---|---|---|
| Mulching | Reducing standing vegetation to chip where it stands, in one pass, with nothing hauled off. The chip stays on the ground as a layer. | Not clearing. Root systems are untouched and alive underneath. |
| Grubbing | Pulling root masses and the organic layer out of the ground, as opposed to cutting at or above grade. | Not stump grinding, which only chases the visible stump down a few inches. |
| Clearing | grubbing plus removal. The material comes out of the ground and off the footprint. | Not a synonym for mulching, whatever a quote says. |
| Grading | Shaping the ground to a deliberate surface so water runs where you want it to. | Not leveling. Flat is usually the wrong answer; falling away from the structure is the right one. |
| Pad | A raised, compacted platform of clean fill placed in lifts, built above surrounding grade to a specified elevation. | Not a pile of dirt pushed up and rolled over once. |
| Lift | One layer of fill, roughly six to twelve inches, compacted before the next goes on. | Not a measure of total pad height. |
| Structural fill | Clean sand with no organic material or debris in it, suitable to build on. | Not whatever was dug out of the pond, and not free dirt off a job down the road. |
| Stripping | Removing the organic surface layer. Roots, litter, dark soil. Before any fill is placed. | Not scraping the grass off. If dark material is still there, it hasn’t been stripped. |
| Swale | A shallow shaped channel that moves surface water across a property to a low point. | Not a ditch, and not a connection to anything public. Ours stay inside your lines. |
| DBH | Diameter at breast height. How trunk size is measured, about four and a half feet up. | Not the width of the canopy, which is what people usually describe on the phone. |
Everything on this site is written about the ground we actually work. Flatwoods, scrub, old dune ridge and coastal sand across five counties. Where an article names a habitat or a species, it’s because we run into it, not because it filled a page.
Send photos and a rough acreage. You’ll get a real number back, usually within a day.
Request a quoteMost quotes come back the same day. No deposit, and the price we agree on is the price you pay.