Gravel & Rock Delivery in Davie

Davie is nine miles from the yard and orders like nowhere else in Broward. The town deliberately kept its agricultural and equestrian character — large lots, horse properties, unpaved access, bridle paths alongside the roads — and that character drives a completely different material mix from the suburban rest of the county.

Where most of Broward buys base and drainage rock, Davie buys shell rock and millings by the load for driveways, paddock access and ranch roads.

Building in Davie

The defining feature is the long private driveway. On a lot of five acres the drive from the road to the house can be several hundred feet, it is very often unpaved, and paving it in asphalt or concrete would cost more than the improvement is worth.

So it gets built in rock. Shell rock compacts into a firm, light-coloured surface for a fraction of paving cost and nobody is inspecting the bearing value on a private drive. Asphalt millings are the other popular answer — laid in summer heat and rolled, they bind into a dark surface that sheds water and does not dust the way rock does. A common build is shell rock or limerock as the compacted base with two to three inches of millings as the wearing course.

Horse properties add their own requirements. Paddock and arena footing, drainage around barns, and access lanes that need to stay firm when it rains. Wet, churned ground around a barn is a genuine safety problem, and the usual fix is a proper compacted base with drainage rather than more dirt.

Then there is the ordinary residential and commercial work — Nova Southeastern, the Griffin Road corridor, and the newer subdivisions on the western edge — which buys the same base and fill everyone else does.

The other Davie specific: a lot of these properties sit low and flood. Fill dirt for grade raising moves in real volume here, and it needs to be placed in lifts and compacted rather than dumped, or it settles for years.

Materials we deliver to Davie

We carry 21 materials and will haul any of them here. These are the six Davie orders most, with the specification detail you need to order correctly the first time.

Shell Rock in Davie

The cheaper compactable base. Not spec material, and honest about it — but for a driveway or a pad it does the job for less.

Shell rock is a blended shell and limestone product with enough natural fines to bind when it is watered and rolled. Compact it properly and you get a firm, light-coloured surface that sheds water and carries vehicle traffic perfectly well.

What it is not is specification base. The bearing value is lower than limerock base and it varies more between sources. If an engineer has written LBR 100 on your drawing, shell rock does not satisfy it and an inspector will say so.

Within those limits it is genuinely useful and noticeably cheaper. A very large share of the driveways, equipment pads and grove roads in west Broward, the Redland and rural Palm Beach County are built on it, and they hold up fine because nothing on them requires certified bearing capacity.

Full Shell Rock specification, coverage figures and FAQ →

Specification

What Davie customers use it for

• Residential driveways and parking pads
• Ranch, grove and equestrian access roads
• Trailer, container and equipment pads
• Non-structural fill and grade correction
• Temporary construction access
• Walking paths and back-of-house yard areas

Is shell rock as good as limerock?

For a driveway or a pad, functionally yes and for less money. For specified base course under pavement, no — the bearing value is lower and it will not satisfy an LBR 100 specification.

Asphalt Millings in Davie

Milled asphalt, delivered loose. Rolled in summer heat it knits back into a dark, firm surface for a fraction of the price of paving.

When a road is resurfaced, the top layer is ground off by a milling machine. That ground-up material — reclaimed asphalt pavement, RAP, or just millings — still contains the asphalt binder that held the original pavement together.

Spread it, compact it, and let South Florida do the rest. Sitting in direct sun at ninety-plus degrees, the residual binder softens and the particles knit together into a firm, dark surface that sheds water and holds up to regular vehicle traffic. It is not asphalt paving and it will never be as smooth or as durable, but it costs a small fraction of what paving costs and it dramatically outperforms loose rock on a driveway.

Timing matters more than with any other material we sell. Millings placed in June and rolled will set up hard within days. The same load placed in January on a cool, damp week takes far longer to bind and may need re-rolling. If you have a choice, do it in summer.

Full Asphalt Millings specification, coverage figures and FAQ →

Specification

What Davie customers use it for

• Residential and agricultural driveways
• Overflow and employee parking areas
• Ranch, grove and nursery access roads
• Temporary haul roads and construction access
• Trailer and equipment pads
• Dust control on unpaved yards

How long do asphalt millings take to harden?

In summer heat, days. In cooler or wetter weather it can take weeks and may need re-rolling. Sun exposure is the main driver — a shaded driveway never binds as firmly as one in full sun.

Limerock Base in Davie

The material South Florida is built on. If it is paved, there is almost certainly limerock underneath it.

Limerock is mined limestone crushed and graded so that it runs the full range from roughly three and a half inches down to powder. That full gradation is the entire point. The coarse pieces carry load, the fines fill the voids between them, and when you add water and roll it, the fines cement the whole thing into a slab you can drive a loaded truck across.

South Florida sits on limestone, which means the material is quarried locally and hauled short distances — and that is why base here costs what it costs. In most of the United States, road base is crushed granite or gravel trucked in from a distance. Here, the Miami oolite formation in Miami-Dade and the Ocala limestone further north put the quarry inside the market.

You will see it written as limerock, lime rock and crushed limestone depending on who wrote the document, and heard as base rock or DOT base on site. Engineers specify it by FDOT section number. It is all the same product.

Full Limerock Base specification, coverage figures and FAQ →

Specification

What Davie customers use it for

• Base course under asphalt roads, driveways and parking lots
• Base under concrete slabs, aprons and sidewalks
• Compacted base beneath paver installations
• Structural fill and sub-base where bearing capacity is specified
• Stabilised construction entrances and haul roads
• Pads for equipment, containers and modular buildings

What is the difference between limerock and crushed limestone?

Nothing meaningful in this market. "Crushed limestone" is the generic description, "limerock" is the South Florida term, and FDOT documentation calls it limerock base. Same material.

Fill Dirt in Davie

Bulk soil for moving grade. Cheap by the ton, and the material most often ordered in the wrong quantity.

Fill dirt is screened soil sold by the ton for moving volume. The word that matters is clean: no roots, no construction debris, no trash, no significant organic content. Organic material rots, and soil with organics in it keeps settling for years after you thought the job was finished.

Where a specification calls for structural fill, the requirements are tighter — a specified gradation and a compaction standard, usually verified by a testing lab. If your drawing says structural fill, tell us, because that is a different order from generic clean fill.

For most residential and light-commercial work — raising a low corner of a yard, building a pad, backfilling an old pool — clean fill is what you want and what we deliver.

Full Fill Dirt specification, coverage figures and FAQ →

Specification

What Davie customers use it for

• Raising lot grade and correcting low spots
• Building up pads before base and slab work
• Backfilling excavations and old pool removals
• Landscape berms, mounds and contouring
• Filling behind retaining walls and seawalls
• General bulk volume where bearing is not critical

How many tons of fill dirt do I need?

Work out cubic yards (length × width × depth in feet, divided by 27), multiply by about 1.25 to get tons, then add 15 to 25 percent for compaction. Our tonnage calculator does this and converts to truckloads.

Topsoil in Davie

Screened growing soil by the load. The layer that decides whether new sod takes or dies in six weeks.

Much of South Florida sits on sand and limestone with very little native topsoil. Strip a lot for construction and what you are left with is not a growing medium — it is fill. Sod laid straight onto it will green up for a few weeks on the strength of what came with the pallet and then decline.

Screened topsoil is the layer that fixes that. It holds moisture and nutrients long enough for roots to establish, and in a climate where the rain arrives in violent bursts and then does not come back for two weeks, moisture retention is the whole game.

The practical minimum for sod is 2 inches; 4 is better. Planting beds want 6 to 12 depending on what is going in them.

Full Topsoil specification, coverage figures and FAQ →

Specification

What Davie customers use it for

• Sod preparation and lawn establishment
• Filling and levelling planting beds
• Lawn repair and low-spot correction
• Raised beds and vegetable gardens
• Topdressing over fill before landscaping
• Tree and shrub planting backfill

How much topsoil do I need for new sod?

Two inches minimum, four is better. One ton covers roughly 130 square feet at 2 inches, so a 2,000 square foot lawn needs about 15 tons at that depth.

#57 Rock in Davie

The workhorse drainage stone of South Florida. Open-graded, angular, and the default answer whenever water has to move through rock instead of sitting on it.

#57 is a gradation, not a rock type. The number comes from the AASHTO/ASTM sizing chart, and it describes stone that passes a 1-1/2 inch sieve and is retained on a No. 4 — in practice, pieces running roughly three-quarters of an inch to an inch, with the fines washed out.

In most of the country #57 is granite or trap rock. In South Florida it is crushed limestone, quarried locally, which is why it costs a fraction of what the same gradation costs in Georgia and why nearly every drainage detail on a Broward or Miami-Dade plan set specifies it. You will hear it called #57 stone by engineers and spec writers and 57 rock by everyone actually standing on the job. Same material.

The defining property is what has been removed. Because the fines are washed out, the stone will not knit together and will not compact. Stack it and it stays a pile of loose angular rock with roughly a third of its volume as open void. That void is the whole point: water runs straight through it instead of perching on top.

Full #57 Rock specification, coverage figures and FAQ →

Specification

What Davie customers use it for

• French drains and trench drains — the standard backfill stone
• Septic drainfields and pump chambers
• Under-slab drainage layer beneath concrete
• Pipe bedding and backfill where flow matters more than support
• Coarse aggregate in ready-mix concrete
• Loose driveways and equipment pads where mud is the enemy
• Erosion control at downspouts and swale outfalls

Is #57 stone the same as #57 rock?

Yes. "Stone" is the term on plan sets and in ASTM/AASHTO documentation; "rock" is what it is called on job sites throughout South Florida. Both refer to the same washed, open-graded gradation running roughly 3/4" to 1".

Ground conditions in Broward County

Two features of Broward ground drive nearly every material decision made here, and understanding them saves a great deal of money.

The water table

Groundwater sits close to the surface across the whole county and very close in the eastern third. In practical terms that means excavations fill, subgrades stay damp, and anything built without a drainage path will eventually sit in water.

The consequence for material selection is that open-graded washed stone appears in a very high proportion of details here. #57 rock under slabs, in French drains, around drainfields and at swale outfalls is not an optional refinement in Broward — it is the standard way of keeping water moving. Contractors arriving from drier markets consistently under-specify it and consistently regret doing so.

Limestone close to the surface

Underneath the sand cap is limestone, often within a few feet. That is why excavation here sometimes needs a hammer rather than a bucket, and it is why base rock is affordable: limerock is quarried locally rather than railed in from another state.

What this means for base

Subgrade preparation matters more than the base material you choose. A damp, poorly compacted subgrade will fail under any base, including the most expensive spec limerock. Stabilise and compact what is underneath, place base in lifts of roughly six inches compacted, water to near optimum moisture, and roll each lift before adding the next.

Get that right and crushed concrete will outlast a badly built limerock section at meaningfully lower cost. Get it wrong and no material saves you.

Getting a truck onto your Davie site

Davie access is mostly generous — big lots, wide entrances, room to turn — with one significant caveat: soft ground.

A loaded tri-axle raising its bed puts very high loads through the rear axles, and unpaved drives, pasture, and anything that has had rain on it recently will not always hold that. We get stuck in Davie more than anywhere else in the county, and it is almost always on ground somebody thought would be fine.

Point us at the firmest approach. If the drive is long and soft, it is usually better to drop at the road end and move the material with a tractor or skid steer than to bury a truck halfway down it. If we can only get partway, we will tell you rather than trying it.

Overhead is the second thing to check. Low branches over a long unpaved drive will stop a truck raising a bed, and canopy on older Davie roads is substantial.

Before you order

Four things worth reading once if this is your first load into Davie. Each opens the full guide.

Areas we cover in Davie

Old Davie, Forest Ridge, Shenandoah, Rolling Hills, Orange Park, Pine Island Ridge, Long Lake Ranches border, the Griffin Road corridor, Nova Drive and the Southwest Ranches boundary.

If your street is not on that list, we still deliver there — it is not an exhaustive index, just the areas we are asked about most.

Davie — common questions

Broward County — general questions

Nearby cities we also serve

All of Broward County → · Full service area →