Land Clearing & Forestry Mulching in Royal Oak, Michigan

Royal Oak, Clawson, Berkley and Huntington Woods are the four cities closest to our yard, most of them a five- or ten-minute drive door to door. They were platted a lot at a time in the first half of the last century, on a grid of alleys that still runs behind most blocks, and the lot sizes were set then too: a standard city lot, or two of them bought together and built as one. The Red Run drain, mostly buried under the streets now, threads through the north and east side of Royal Oak on its way toward Madison Heights and Warren, and the stretches of it still open to the air carry the same brush any Southeast Michigan waterway does.

An alley that nobody has cut back in a few years closes in with mulberry, box elder and volunteer growth until it is a single-lane tunnel, and a double lot bought for the extra yard space grows the same wall of buckthorn and honeysuckle as a bigger property, just in miniature. A back fence line between two mowed yards is usually where it shows up first, since a fence line is the one strip of ground nobody's mower ever quite reaches. We work these lots with the same tracked machine we run on a five-acre parcel, just on a smaller pattern, and grind the brush into a chip layer that stays in the yard instead of going out to the curb.