New land with young trees

This may not be in the right topic thread, so feel free to relocate this question.

My husband and I are looking at land to buy, and everything seems to be wooded. As in, completely.  Not stands of valuable timber, just completely covered in young to mid size "weed" trees.  To grow, and build a home, we need a place that gets lots of  natural light. Besides the fact that I like open spaces and sun.  Hiring a company to clear the land would be expensive; doing it ourselves might be a death wish (we are months from the 60 mark, and we've never cut anything bigger than a small branch from a tree).

Are we overlooking an option?

Hi emilie,

The costs of land clearing may be much less than you think, depending upon how much land you want cleared.  The major problems I see with land clearing are the destruction of the top soil and what to do with the resulting pile of dirt and brush.  I suspect, based upon your stated experience, that you might be better off continuing your search.

Where I live there are many large ranches that remove certain species of trees. They go in with equipment and just shove the trees down.

I have also bought a lot where many of the trees were removed.

I see two ways to do this.

Option One:  Once you have land, mark the trees you want to keep.  Then get estimates from Tree Removal Companies.

These companies might be called arborists, tree services, etc. Many times the name of the company may be different in different areas.


Option Two:  Hire or rent a piece of equipment called a "Bobcat", skid steer, skid loader.  

With this option, the trees are not cut down.  The trees are pushed over by the equipment.

Of course, I can't quote prices for your area though where I live I can hire someone with a Bobcat for $750.00 or rent one for $500.00 and get someone like dear hubby to run it.

All this of course depends on the size of the land and how big the trees are.

Here are some example to explain: