Land clearing project

[Anonymous Poster]

We purchased 5 acres in Okeechobee, Florida last November, and started doing some minor clearing several weeks ago. Now, we're getting serious. I just uploaded some pictures to a gallery. Now, most people would think that looking at pictures of brush and land is pretty boring, but seems like folks on TBN eat it up.

A little background - the property is next door to 2-1/2 acres owned by my daughter and son-in-law, Amy & Doug. Betsy is my wife. The property has a lot of nice live oaks, laurel oaks, red maples, cabbage palms, queen palms, palmetto, and the ubiquitous wax myrtle, all native plants. It was also infested with wild grape vines and Brazilian pepper trees, also called Florida Holly, which are invasive trash shrubs. The wild grape vines are almost as bad as kudzu. We're clearing nothing but the trash. Then, I'll use my box blade, landscape rake and other implements to level and grade. Florida soil doesn't really exist - the consistency is almost all sand, with absolutely no rocks.

I'll be building a barn, either 32x40 or 32x48, first, then the house. My priorities are in order... /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Enjoy. All comments welcome. More will be coming. I didn't optimize them yet, so dial-up might be slow...

Okeechobee gallery

 

[Spencer]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( I'll be building a barn, either 32x40 or 32x48, first, then the house. My priorities are in order... /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif )</font>

Have you checked with your local unit of government to see if that is possible. In my county here in Michigan there needs to be a primary residence on the property before there can be an accessory building. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

Thanks for sharing the pictures.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Spencer, that's one of the best reasons I have for moving. The community I live in now has rules about how to read the rules. In Okeechobee, the barn is the primary building (slight exxageration /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif ).

Case in point. Where I live now, to set a driveway culvert requires a small army of engineers, surveyors and rocket scientists. In Okeechobee, I stopped at the county road office and told them I wanted to set a culvert. They said they'd check it out and establish the conditions. Next morning, I got a call. "The flow is to the North. That means the North end of the pipe has to be a little lower than the South end of the pipe. Good luck."

Now, to be fair to the Okeechobee folks, there is a great deal more trust out there. They assume you know how to do it, won't try to shortcut it, and won't do anything to hurt the community. If you take advantage of them, the cooperation gets a lot more difficult.

Speaking of the barn, I bought mail order plans from here: barnplans.com. It may be more expensive than a pole barn, but I wanted a lot of storage, and the gambrel roof design works best for me. I bought the 32x40 plans, which can be stretched to any length, I'm going to try to budget for 32x48. I'll be raising the walls for 12' clearance under the loft, and adding a shed roof at one side. The attachment shows a similar one without the shed roof.

 

[bmac]

Great pics. BTW - How many snakes have you seen? I would imagine you have some nice rattlers down your way.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Surprisingly, no snakes yet! Doug said he saw a moccasin by the state road swale when he was bush hogging, but that was outside the fence. The first time Betsy and I walked the property before buying it ("hacked" the property might be a better term considering how overgrown it was), we had on jeans and heavy boots, not knowing what we'd find. Since then, my normal attire is shorts and boat shoes. You're right, there are a lot of rattlers in Florida, including the tiny pygmy rattlers that are nasty. So, I spend as much time up on the tractor as possible just so I won't stumble across one. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[hazmat]

Nice pics, hope you don't have a limit on the number of hits to your gallery, the TBN crew has been known to bump up against those.

One question for you. What size tires do you have? The rims look different than my TC18. I know your's is the redesigned model to accomodate the new loader. Looks like the tires are bigger.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know what size tires they are. I may have to wear the TBN dunce cap for a few days for not knowing the details of my own tractor! /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif I assume they are whatever size that NH has in the specs for R4 Industrials, but I never checked. It had turf tires on it when I first saw it, and they switched for me. The tractor's about 45 miles away from where I'm sitting (I don't live on the property, yet), so I can't look.

I don't think there's a low enough limit on the server to cause me any problems, but I'm going to be switching pretty soon, anyway. I have one server for my business site which runs about $20 a month, another for my personal site which only cost about $7.50/month but has limitations, and I have another couple of sites to set up for family, etc. So, I'm going to go with a server that wil let me share 6 domain names, each with it's own 100 MB and plenty of bandwidth, each with unlimited Msysql, and each with it's own PHP BBS system, and unlimited sub domains (sub.name.com), all for $250/year, or about what I'm paying for a much more limited commercial site, now.

 

[hazmat]

No dunce cap needed. I wouldn't be able to quote the tire sizes off the top of my head. But then the tractor is about 30 feet from me in the garage.

The New Holland web site states Rears are 12X16.5 and fronts are 23X8.5-12. Which is what I've got. The TC24 has 15X19.5 and 25X8.5-14. If you remember to check, that's cool. Just to satisfy my curiosity. My dealer mentioned that the TC18's had bigger tires now due to the redesign, but the web site doesn't reflect that.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

It's been a while since I updated this thread. Been too busy to take many pictures. The tractor passed 130 hours in about 9 weeks. Not many hours this week; taking care of some other stuff I've been neglecting. We also put over 100 hours on the Cat 416C we rented to do the heavier clearing.

The rough clearing is pretty much done, and the result is a 300' long brush pile. I've discussed in another thread why we can't burn it, so we moved over 40 piles into one so it can be buried when the track hoe arrives to excavate the pond.

Here's one end of the pile.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Here's the other end.