How to Get Rid of Palmettos on Your Property (and Why They Keep Coming Back)

If you own land in Central Florida, you have palmettos. And if you’ve tried to get rid of them, you know they don’t go away easily. You can mow a stand of saw palmetto flat to the ground, and three months later it’s right back where it was.

Here’s why that happens, and what actually works to kill palmettos for good.

What palmettos actually are

The plant most Floridians call “palmettos” is Serenoa repens, or saw palmetto. It’s a low-growing palm with fan-shaped fronds and a thick, mostly horizontal stem (called a rhizome) that sits on or just under the ground.

A few biological facts that explain why they’re hard to kill:

• The rhizome is the plant. What you see above ground is just leaves. The actual plant body is the woody, horizontal stem that snakes along the ground or just below it. As long as the rhizome lives, the plant comes back.
• Saw palmetto rhizomes can live for centuries. Some individual saw palmetto plants in Florida are estimated to be 500 to 700 years old. Older than the country.
• They’re built for fire. The native Florida ecosystem is fire-adapted. Palmettos evolved to survive lightning fires that burn off the fronds. The rhizome stays underground, and the plant pushes up new fronds within weeks of a burn.
• They sprout from rhizome fragments. Cut a rhizome in half and both halves can grow into new plants. This is part of why mowing or cutting alone never finishes the job.

So when you mow a stand of palmetto, you’re cutting off the leaves. The plant doesn’t notice. The rhizome is fine. New fronds grow back from buds along the rhizome, usually within a season.

Why mowing alone won’t kill them

This is the most common land-management mistake people make in Florida. They brush hog a palmetto-heavy lot and assume they’ve cleared it. Three months later, the palmettos are back. Six months later, you can barely see they were ever cut.

Brush mowing is great for tall grass, weeds, and saplings. For palmettos, it’s a maintenance tool, not a removal tool. If you mow palmettos every six months indefinitely, you can keep them suppressed at a low height. But you’re not killing them; you’re managing them.

To actually remove palmettos, you have to destroy the rhizome. There are three ways to do that.

Three ways to actually kill palmettos

1. Forestry mulching (best for most properties)

Forestry mulching uses a tractor-mounted drum grinder with carbide teeth. The operator runs the drum from above, and on heavily-overgrown palmetto, runs the drum down to ground level to grind the rhizome itself.

Why this works:

• The drum grinds the rhizome into mulch along with the fronds
• Where the rhizome is destroyed, the plant cannot regrow
• Single-pass treatment; the property looks finished when it’s done
• No chemicals, no burning, no permits

What it costs: typically $2,500 to $5,000 per acre for medium-to-heavy palmetto density.

What it doesn’t do: forestry mulching is a controlled grinding operation, not selective removal. If you have palmettos you want to keep (some properties value the native habitat) you have to flag them.

2. Herbicide treatment (effective but slow)

Saw palmetto can be killed with the right herbicide applied at the right time. The most commonly used active ingredients are:

• Hexazinone (Velpar): soil-applied; gets absorbed by the rhizome through the root system
• Triclopyr (Garlon): foliage- or cut-stump-applied
• Imazapyr (Arsenal): foliage-applied

This is real chemistry and you should either know what you’re doing or hire a licensed applicator. We don’t do herbicide work; we do the mechanical clearing. Plenty of Florida pasture and land management contractors do offer herbicide treatment.

Practical considerations:

• Multiple applications over months are usually required
• Kills slowly (months to fully die back, longer to decompose)
• Can damage non-target plants if applied carelessly
• Some products have grazing restrictions for livestock

For pasture management or large-scale invasive control, herbicide is often the most cost-effective option. For getting a single overgrown lot cleared this month, mulching is faster.

3. Digging and removal (rare, expensive)

For specific situations (foundation prep, small areas, archaeological sensitivity), you can physically dig out palmetto rhizomes with an excavator or hand tools. This is the most thorough and the most expensive approach.

Why it’s rarely the right call:

• Excavator work disturbs the surrounding soil heavily
• The rhizomes are tough and can be deep; removal takes time
• Cost runs $500 to $2,000+ per palmetto stand depending on size
• For most properties, mulching achieves the same outcome for less money

When digging makes sense: small, specific spots where you need 100% removal and zero regrowth, like a building footprint where the foundation has to sit on undisturbed soil.

What it costs to remove palmettos professionally

Real-world ranges:

• Light palmetto cover (scattered stands across an acre): $2,000 to $3,500 per acre via mulching
• Medium cover (palmettos as the dominant ground vegetation): $3,000 to $4,500 per acre via mulching
• Heavy cover (continuous palmetto carpet with little else): $4,000 to $5,500 per acre via mulching
• Selective removal (preserving certain stands): quoted per job

Add 30 to 50% if you want everything hauled off rather than mulched in place. Most people are happy with the mulched finish.

DIY versus hiring out

Some honest opinions:

DIY makes sense if: you have a small area (less than a quarter acre), you have or can rent the right equipment (a track loader with a brush cutter or mulcher attachment is the right tool), and you’re patient enough to do multiple passes.

Hiring out makes sense if: you have an acre or more, you don’t own a tractor, you want it done in a day or two, or you’ve already tried the brush hog approach and the palmettos came back. Most people in Central Florida who try the DIY route either burn out, undersize the equipment, or end up with a half-cleared lot that grows back faster than they can keep up with.

The cost of renting a track loader with a mulcher attachment for a weekend (typically $800 to $1,500) plus your time often gets close to or exceeds what a contractor charges to do it properly with bigger equipment.

How to keep them from coming back

After you’ve cleared palmettos, the seed bank in the soil is still there. Without active management, palmettos will start re-establishing within a year or two. To keep a cleared property palmetto-free:

• Maintain the cover. Establish a turf grass (Bahia is most common in Central Florida pasture) or a planted ground cover that competes with palmetto seedlings.
• Mow regularly. Twice-yearly brush mowing keeps any new palmetto growth from establishing.
• Spot-treat new sprouts. When you see a young palmetto coming back, treat it with herbicide while it’s small. Easier to kill at year one than year five.
• Limit soil disturbance. Tilling and grubbing can bring buried rhizome fragments back to the surface where they sprout. Once cleared, leave the soil alone.

For pasture and ag-exemption properties, ongoing pasture mowing is the maintenance rhythm that keeps palmettos in check after the initial mulching reset.

Get your palmetto-heavy property cleared

If you’re done fighting palmettos with a brush hog and want them actually gone, send us your address and a few photos. We respond within 24 hours with a real number for your specific situation.