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.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Another view (only on TBN would people get a kick out of looking at piles of trash brush /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif )

 

[Spencer]

Don, that's quite some pile. Is there anything left growing out there? How is that root rake project coming along?

 

[MikePA]

<font color="blue"> so we moved over 40 piles into one so it can be buried </font>
What are you going to do when that buried brush rots and the ground sinks?

 

[Anonymous Poster]

The track hoe that's coming has a reach of 53'. He will dig a trench in front of the pile, reach across and pull it in, partially fill it, run the D6 across it to compact, and repeat in layers. Finally, he will leave a mound of dirt about 2' high to settle back to level as the pile decomposes. Much of the pile is dirt-encrusted wild grape roots, which came up like rolling up a carpet, so it should settle pretty evenly. A couple of the larger trees will be saved out to go in the bottom of the pond for fish structure. The pond will start somewhat to the left of thise pictures, and the house and barn will be further to the left. Nothing is scheduled to go in this corner except a border of flowering trees and shrubs where the brush pile sits, now, so there will be few problems as it settles. Before it settles, the mound will actually add a bit of variety to the flat Florida landscape.

 

[MikePA]

What a great solution! /forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Spencer, yep, there's still a lot growing - in fact, by the time I'm done grooming nothing but the pepper trees and grape vines that were too small for the big tractor and my root rake, I'll probably have a couple of more "normal" size brush piles. Next, I'm building one of those brush scoops that stick out like a vee with a couple of teeth on the end, because the little saplings fall between the teeth on the rake.

The rake is finished and worked almost as well as I expected. I don't have any working pictures (it was just too blamed hot to climb on and off the tractor), but here's a shot just before we went to work. When the brush was mostly branches and loose, we could fill up the rake. But, most of what we moved was totally crusted with dirt and tightly packed roots, so the problem that arose was the horizontal tube from the box blade, that holds the shanks, formed a barrier and we couldn't get large loads.

What we ended up doing was using the big tractor to move the piles (yep, every inch of that pile came from somewhere else, moved a rake-full at a time, into a headwind that blew the dirt back onto me), and using the little tractor to organize the piles and get them ready for the big rake. Sort of like using a broom to organize a dirt pile before sweeping it into the dust pan, but on a bigger scale. Two of us working took good hunks of 5 days to move it all.

Mike, I posted what the contractor told me about settling wile you were posting your question. He's been doing it for 30 years. Remember, it's mostly sand in the pile, and sand in the trench, so it should marry together pretty good. When you try to burn a small pile, you end up with a pile of sand about 6' high with some charred wood still in it. The wild grape vine was everywhere. We lowered the level of the whole property a good 3", and more in places, as we removed it. If we didn't, it would be invasive again in a few months. Things grow fast in Florida, especially the things you don't want.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Wow you have been busy out there OkeeDon. Makes me glad the property that i got was mostly cleared just some perimeter growth to deal with. That is alot of stuff to bury. BradK

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Mike, we've got to stop playing message tag! /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Here's another shot of the rake in limited action before it was painted and before I got the hang of using it.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

Those are the dreaded, noxious Brazilian Pepper Trees. Here's a shot showing the limitation of getting things into the rake. If I had custom shanks made up with a different curve, it would work even better, but that would escalate the cost a lot. I have less than $200 in this rake. I don't have the equipment to make my own shanks - wish I lived near WroughtnHarv.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

That's my son-in-law in the previous picture - he's gotten really good at handling both the big and the little tractor. Neither of us had done anything like this 3 months ago. He's good friends with the contractor who has the trackhoe; I don't doubt he'll wangle his way onto that, too, before it's done. The contractor is bringing the trackhoe, a D6 dozer, at least one and maybe two loaders, and two dump trucks out for the pond and brush project. As he digs the pond, he'll load the trucks and move the spoil to where we need it as fill for the house, barn, road, and a long low strip next to the state's highway swale. They'll grade it, compact it and level it for me. Pond will be about 1/4 acre; my rough estimate is about 1600 cubic yards. I'll use it all on the property. Did I mention that Florida is Flat? It's also low in places...never high unless you make it that way.

Estimates to bring in the fill ran upwards of $8K to $10K. Instead, the budget for the pond is $4K, and we'll get all the grading etc., and end up with the pond afterwards, which will increase the value of the property more than we spent. Can you say Win-Win? The burial is expected to add about $900 to the bill.

This is a shot of the "before" to bring things into perspective. I haven't been there yet this week, busy with other stuff, but I'll get some more pix of the land this weekend. It's a total transformation.