Clearing Land

[timfromohio]

TimfromOhio here,

Long time, no posts. Used to be Tim from NEOhio, now Tim from SWOhio. Living in apartment while looking for new house, have no stove, depressed ....

Anyway, several places we've looked at have EXTREMELY wooded lots. Good from a wood burnings perspective, bad from a need large cleared space for garden perspective.

Anyone have experience in clearing land? Costs? Equipment used? I called a few excavating companies and have tried to get some of those guys to meet me to walk the potential properties but no luck yet - they'll all quite busy. I have no concept of what a skilled guy with a bulldozer can do in a couple of days. Any advice or experiences appreciated.

Best Regards to all!

 

[semipro]

You can harvest the timber yourself or have someone else do it. Leave the stumps about person height and then hire someone with a dozer to come in and knock the stumps over and remove them. The taller stump gives them plenty of leverage to work with.. You can harvest the stump top after the dozer has removed it. The dozer can also push the stumps to central location for composting, habitat creation, disposal, onsite burning. You should consider bringing in some fill to replace the volume of the stumps otherwise you may create low spots prone to water issues. If you do this while the dozer is there they can grade and compact.

If the timber is clear and you only have stumps left you'll be amazed what a good dozer operator can do in a short time. I also prefer to chip rather than burn branches and brush to return organics to the soil. Disturbed soil is unlikely to have the good organic content needed for gardening.

 

[timfromohio]

semipro - thanks for the response. Any idea what a fair price is for bulldozer? Pay per day, per acre cleared?

 

[gzecc]

I had a friends remove 20 huge pine stumps from our yard after Sandy a couple of yrs ago. The stumps became a problem because in our town you can't put them in a burn pile. I had to rent a 40 yrd dumpster at $700 to get rid of them. The excavator with a claw could pull smaller trees righ out of the ground. Around here its approx $1000 per day for a machine and operator like this.

 

[semipro]

semipro - thanks for the response. Any idea what a fair price is for bulldozer? Pay per day, per acre cleared?

Opps. I'd have sworn I replied already.
No idea on costs. Either someone else was paying the bill or I rented the equipment and did the work myself.

 

[Highbeam]

Are we talking large lots or small ones? Mature forest or doghair?

I have cleared more than half of my 15 acre woodlot and used a few methods. A bulldozer is the wrong tool since you seem to care about gardening or growing things. Dozers are old school and will cause problems with dirt in your slash, stripping topsoil, unable to pull larger stumps, terrible at stacking slash for burning, or burying. Dozers are quickly becoming limited to road building as the far superior excavators have gotten better and better.

An excavator is like a big hand to reach out and pluck vegetation from the earth. Then stack it in a neat, tall, compact pile or load it into a tub grinder, or bury it. I prefer burning since even a small amount of land creates a HUGE pile of slash that will not rot anytime soon. My last burn permit was for a pile 50 feet in any direction. Man was it hot.

How do you plan to use the land? If you could run right over a stump with a mower deck would it bother you to leave it in the ground? Stump grinding beats stump removal unless you are going to build there.

Given the current regulations I would look for the guys with forestry mowers. It's like a huge chipper head on a bobcat or front end loader that goes along and mows the forest into hog fuel evenly dispersed and aven grinds below grade so that the finished product can be mowed while the slash decomposes. Next best is excavator to limit soil compaction, topsoil stripping, and minimize the slash pile.

I am a firm believer in having a view of trees but not having trees near your house. They are very overrated.

 

[timfromohio]

Thanks for all of the replies. I've seen the attachments for the front of a bobcat but the property in question has lots of big trees and the terrain isn't flat. I was thinking a bulldozer could do some leveling at the same time as removing brush/trees. Maybe it's a two part process as I like the idea of chipping/shredding and leaving the organic matter. I could probably live with leaving large stumps in the ground and working around them.