We are in the same situation with our lot. My contractor owns a backhoe and a chainsaw. Before we can lay out the house properly we need to cut the "jungle" down just so we can do prep work. He is going to cut the brush and leave the big trees, then later if any of the big trees are in the way he will cut them down and dig out the stumps with the bachoe. He said using the backhoe rather than starting in there will a bulldozer will prevent scarring up some of the older larger trees that we want to keep. The brush we will pile up and burn. The larger wood I am saving for my outdoor wood furnace-its future free fuel to heat the house-well not "free" but at least it is not $2.79/gal like LPG. Another thing that you can do is rent or find someone with a small utility tractor and a brush hog. I rented one for this same lot 2 years ago and cleaned up stuff up to 2 inches. A little 30-40 HP tractor can make quick work of stuff like this. If you rent one you want one with a hydrostatic transmission. They are essentially an "automatic" transmission and they are as easy as an electric golf cart to drive. Be safe!!

We used the company below to clear underbrush from our 4.5 acres. Maybe you can find someone like them near you.

They will likely use a combination of brush cutters (they have ones that handle a few inches) and chain saws. And it will be much more expensive than doing more clearing because it will be a lot more labor. Usually you mark you trees you want (usually 4" or larger, or even larger than that) and the rest goes. You want to keep a lot more. If your woods are like ours this will require someone work on their feet rather than in a machine.

We've been in the house a few year and are now cleaning up the woods, getting rid of the real small stuff (except the nice small stuff, like blueberries). It's tedious, labor intensive work that can't be done by machine.

I agree with the backhoe and chainsaw. That is how I do it, we rent for pretty cheap. I would love to be able to afford to buy a used one. Even small backhoes can take down most trees, dig around the roots and push. Manzanita is the tough stuff.

We burn the good wood in our stove and we take all of our pine, wood scraps, and brush to the local biomass plant, where they chip it and burn it for power. We bury stumps in the woods.

I've never used a brush mower so I can't help you there. I do have a friend that volunteered to use his brush mower to clear our land. We turned down his offer because, like you, we wanted to leave some trees and decide for ourselves what stayed and what was cut.

My DH and I are currently clearing our building site ourselves. (We have 66+ acres of all woods but are only clearing for the house site and some of the surrounding area.) We have a few nice sized trees but most of them are small saplings. Like you, we want to remove the small stuff before deciding on the larger trees.

How we are doing this is: I'm going through with loppers (long-handled pruners) and cutting everything that is small enough to be cut with the loppers (which is quite a bit) but leaving the small trees of certain species that we may want to keep even if they are small now. I'm stacking the cut trees off to the side so that we can see what is left. Then my DH is going through with our chainsaw and cutting the smallest of the still remaining trees that were too big for me to cut with the loppers. Next, he's making decisions about the bigger trees that are remaining. He's cutting out a few here and there so that the ones that remain aren't too close together that they interfer with each other's growth. We want the trees to eventually grow wide (like they do with no competition) instead of tall (like they do with competition).

It's taking us some time to do this since we only work on the weekends but it is enjoyable work for us and is helping us to get a better feel for the land.

My husband rented a walk behind brush mower for three acres of pasture and trees. It would wear him out and he is in good shape.

He rented that brush mower about three times before we paid someone to bush hog. My husband and I took bright orange flagging tape and taped individual trees and also taped around clusters of trees we wanted to save.

For large trees such as cedars which we did not want, we used a chainsaw and took those out ourselves. We had about 3 acres to keep clear.

Like flash, it became a weekend thing. We now have our own tractor and bush hog it ourselves.

I cleared quite a bit of brush with a combination of a brush whacker, machete, chainsaw, and pole saw. We are also in WA State and had mostly salmon berries and black berries to clear.

For the lighter clearing I found the machete and chainsaw worked pretty well. For the blackberries, the pole saw cut right through them and kept them far away from my face which was nice.

You might also consider using a few goats. There is a place that "rents" them locally, but it seems awfully expensive. We are considering buying a couple goats to take care of the remainder of our brush after we move in.

bob

I just went through this with our build which finished in dec 08. Our house is in the blueridge mtns of VA - and we had a very dense lot of trees with a lot of nasty brush. We also had no idea of what we were getting into when we bought this lot and my goodness - and it was a tremendous amount of debris that had to be removed. I wish we had thought about this first - but I leraned a few things that might help.

The big problem with a lot like ours is that when you start to push brush out of the way it piles up very quickly. The brush pile can get so large that a wheeled tractor might not be able to push it. We started with a medium size bulldozer with a blade to cut the driveway and allow us to get back to where the house would be located - about 700 feet in from the main road. The brush that was ripped (and you need to make sure they rip the roots out of the ground) was pushed into a large pile which the dozer ran over many times to compact. It really wasn't that hard for the operator to avoid the medium and large trees - but the smaller trees in the drive had to go anyway and the dozer just pulled those right out of the ground. So after step 1 - we had a rough cut drive and a large debris pile which was tucked away in a portion of the lot where we could hide it. It is a great idea to locate that spot before you start and think about access to it after the house project is done.

Then the big machines came in to clear out the septic field and house site. This was a large dozer, a large back hoe, and a large chipper. They cut the trees down with chain saws so that they had long logs - about 20 feet each - which they neatly piled in 2 out of the way places on the lot (they were out of the way but could be accessed easily later.) The crowns and branches of the trees were cut up and run through the chipper. The root balls were dug up with the back hoe and pushed to the front of the brush pile where they could be accessed later. The additional brush was pulled up and added to end of the brush pile. When they were done clearing the various types of debirs each type was piled seperately. And each of these piles could be accessed by trucks and heavy equipment later for disposal - without tearing up my yard or driveway.

You can burn brush but we opted to not go that route. Aside from the very strict fire codes and special requirements by the fire marshall when you do a large open burn - we were affraid to start a forrest fire. Once you get one of these piles on fire, you can try and contain them (if you have the right equipment in place and build a proper pit) but the embers are going to fly. We just didn't want to risk it. If you start a fire you are liable for any damage.

Our strategy is to let the brush pile rot for a few years and we will then have the large pieces removed (big pieces of trees and root balls) but the rest will be crushed and either burried on the site or crushed by the machines and spread out on the lot as mulch. Once the brush has been weathered a lot of it will decompose and fall apart when it is run over by a large machine. Since they piled the parge piecs at the front of the pile and the smaller stuff at the back of the pile, we have some sense of order for attacking it.

For our future clearing efforts, i plan on using a light machine (tractor, skid steer, or bob cat) to clear out brush and a smaller chipper to grind it down. With these smaller machines, I can avoid ripping small trees that I might want to keep and will certainly maneuver around large trees. Once I get the brush and smaller stuff ripped out and chipped, then I will bring in the lumber jacks to take out some trees. I will have the logs cut and piled, and chip the crown and branches just like my excavator did. I plan on doing this over a number of years, in smaller manageable chunck of land, so that I don't wind up with a giant pile of debris like I had when we first cleared.

It is a good thing you are planning this now. I wish I had the foresight to see what happened and we counted on the builder to deal with it. He had a plan - but I am not happy with the end result. Some of that big brush pile is hidden in the woods but there is a good chunck of it that I can see when I look out the front of my house (that is beacuse we started to run out of room on the 1.5 acres in the front of the lot where we piled all this stuff). I need to have a portion of that brush pile removed because I am tired of looking at the mess.

A DR machine might not be big enough for your clearing project - especially the first cuts you need to make for the drive, septic, and house site. I could see going in there first with a bob cat just or skid steer to clear a path so you can walk into the lot and site things - and those machines are very easy to steer around small trees. When you start to rip out stuff to clear larger areas - you will need a beefier machine like a dozer.

Best of luck with he project.