You are clearing a lot and you have been picturing the finished ground, not the pile. Then the first trees come down and you realize a wooded acre turns into a mountain of trunks, limbs, stumps and root balls, and every bit of it has to go somewhere before you have a lot instead of a mess. There are three ways it goes, and which one fits depends on what you are building and what the lot is made of.
What comes off a lot around here
Start with what you are dealing with, because it changes the answer. A pine and palmetto lot down around Navarre, Gulf Breeze or out toward 30A produces a lot of light, loose volume. Palmetto and yaupon come out as tangled root mats full of sand, pine goes down as long clean stems, and the whole pile is bulky but not especially heavy. Up in the hardwood bottoms along the Blackwater and the Yellow River, or on an old homesite in Baker or DeFuniak Springs with big scrub oaks and live oaks on it, you get the opposite. Dense wood, heavy stumps, and root balls that come out of the clay carrying half the ground with them.
Volume and weight are what the trucks care about, and the trucks are what you are paying for. Light brush fills a truck by volume before it fills it by weight. A load of oak stumps with clay in the roots fills it by weight with room to spare. Same acre, different number of loads, different bill.
Hauling it off
Hauling is the default when the lot is headed for a house pad, a slab or anything else that needs bare, clean ground. The excavator loads, the dump trucks and roll off trucks run, and the debris leaves the property for good. Stumps come out whole and go with it, because nothing living and nothing rotting stays under a pad. We haul to our own pit at 3125 River Rd in Navarre, which keeps the trucking short from most of Santa Rosa and Okaloosa and means we are not waiting on somebody else's gate to open.
What drives the cost of hauling is honest arithmetic. How many loads, how far each one runs, and how easy the lot is to load from. A tight lot with one narrow way in costs more than an open field with the same trees on it, because everything has to be staged and shuttled instead of just loaded.
Grinding it on site
The second option keeps everything on the property. A forestry mulcher is a drum of teeth on the front of a tracked machine, and it chews standing trees and brush into mulch and leaves it right where it grew. No loading, no trucks, no pile. When the machine is done the lot is open and walkable, with a layer of shredded wood on the ground that holds the sand in place and rots down over time.
Mulching is the right answer far more often than people expect, and the wrong answer in one specific case. If you want to open up land, get rid of the palmetto and scrub, cut a trail, see your property lines, clear around a pond or make a pasture out of a thicket, forestry mulching does that with less handling than anything else, because nothing leaves the lot. It also does not tear up the ground the way an excavator does, so the sand stays put.
The wrong case is a building pad. Mulch is organic material, organic material rots and settles, and a pad built over it will show you cracks in the slab later. The mulcher also grinds a stump to the ground, but the root mass stays in the dirt. For anything you are going to build on, the stumps come out with the excavator and the pad area gets grubbed clean. Plenty of lots get both, mulched everywhere except the footprint of the house and the driveway, which gets cleared, grubbed and hauled. That combination is often the smartest money on a wooded lot.
Burning it
Burning is the one we get asked about the most and the one we say the least about, on purpose. Whether you can burn on your parcel, what you can burn, and on which days, is not a dirt contractor's call. It changes with where the lot is, what is around it, the weather that day and the time of year, and the county and the forestry office are the ones who tell you. Call them before you light anything, and if you do not know which office to call, call us and we will help you figure out who to ask.
What we can tell you from the ground is practical. A green pile does not burn, it smolders and smokes for a long time. Stumps with dirt in them barely burn at all. A burn pile on a small lot in a neighborhood in Navarre or Gulf Breeze is going to make you the least popular person on the street. If you are going to burn, plan the clearing around it, with the pile set where the county and the forestry office say it can go, and dry, clean material stacked apart from the stumps and dirt.
Logs, firewood and things you want to keep
Every so often a lot has trees worth keeping in some form. Straight pine that somebody wants milled, oak the owner wants bucked for firewood, a big live oak that stays standing. Tell us before the machine starts, not after. We can set logs aside where you want them and fence off the ground under a tree you are keeping so the roots do not get packed and buried. What we cannot do is leave a pile of logs on the lot with no plan for it, because a pile of logs with no plan is a pile you pay to haul later.
Anything leaning over a house, a road or a neighbor's fence is tree service work before it is clearing work. We do not climb, and neither does any other dirt crew. Get those handled first and then bring us in.
NOBL Sitework is a licensed general contractor (CGC1537340) clearing and mulching lots across Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, Walton, Escambia, and Bay counties. If you have a wooded lot and no idea what to do with what comes off it, call us at 850-238-3307 and we will walk it with you and talk through all three options on your ground.
