Yaupon, Privet or Tallow Taking Over in Beaumont, TX

A tallow tree in a Beaumont backyard is a seed source for every lot on the block, and birds carry it to the fence lines and the alley ditches where nobody mows. On an infill lot that has been vacant since Harvey, the thicket is usually tallow along the edges, privet in the shade of whatever mature trees are left, and yaupon filling the middle. It looks like woods from the street. It is mostly a few years old. Working a lot like that is close-quarters work. The mulcher runs at low speed along the neighbor's fence, the excavator handles anything within reach of a slab or a gas meter, and the mature oaks and pecans that are worth keeping get flagged before the machine starts so their root zones are not driven over. Nothing gets burned inside the city, so the mulch mat is the whole point: it stays on the ground, there is no pile, and no truck has to get down the alley.

North and west of town the lots get bigger, the tree line starts, and the calls are about pasture, fence lines and drives that have narrowed. This is where tallow is worst in Jefferson County, because the drainages that run toward Pine Island Bayou carried seed during Harvey and again during Imelda and dropped it on every low spot along the way. A tract that was open when the water came through in 2017 can be closed in now. The method out here is a choice rather than a given. Mulching resets the ground and holds the clay under a mat, and for a tract that is staying as a place to walk, hunt or keep a few animals on, it is the right rotation. Where the land is being converted to a homesite, a real pasture or a shop pad, the roots come out with the excavator so the same three species are not back through the fill in two seasons.

The Beaumont Formation is the reason a bare-ground approach is a mistake on this ground. Strip a closed-in acre to dirt in this city and the first hard rain moves it into the nearest ditch, which then backs up onto the same property. A mulched acre does not move. That is a large part of why we mulch first and only grub where the end use demands it. The clay also sets the calendar. Late summer into fall is the window when the ground carries a tracked machine without rutting, and the wet months from late winter into spring are when a mulcher on saturated clay does more damage than good. We will tell you when the honest answer is to wait two weeks rather than rut a lot to keep a date.

Beaumont grew up around Spindletop and the pipelines that came after it, and easements cross tracts at the edge of this city that look like plain pasture. A marker inside a privet hedge is still a marker. We walk every property first, find what the brush is hiding, and if there is any sign of a line the operator and Texas811 are called before anything with a drum goes over it. On city lots the equivalent hazards are the gas meter, the water line to the alley and old chain link grown through tallow trunks, and all three are cheaper to find on foot than with a machine. Once the walk is done the quote is written for what is actually there, section by section, and the person who writes it is the one who will be on the machine. There is no travel premium for Beaumont because this is where the equipment lives.