WOW it was really our land! Green, beautiful .....and full of thousands of trees. Oaks, yupon holly (in the city you would pay $20 a bush) beauty berry, poison oak and ivy (thats another story later) and grape, just to name a few. The picture here is the most cleared area on the land. We had a hard time figuring out where to put our house at first, so what we did was find a satellite view of our land at http://maps.google.com we could then see how the land was configured to the directions (south,north ect)
then we used a compass to tag a path in which to start cutting.
All the locals said "around here everyone bull doses a road into where you want your house to be, piles the cuttings into one big pile, douse it with gas and let it burn" . We found out it takes up to a year sometimes for the pile to burn down and you have to keep relighting it.
At first we were going to cut and stack the bushes up out of the way and rent a shredder so we did not have to burn. We thought that this was the most green thing to do. Renting a shredder is very expensive and extremely hard work, and after a while our pile of brushes on the side path was getting very, very large. So we started burning. It was late fall when we started this so it was a nice event to keep us warm.
More like cut, drag, burn......rest! Watch out for the stumps!!The first major purchase was a chain saw. We did our research and bought an ECHO ( this has been a very hardy machine and would buy another when this one wears out, as of 3/2009 and many trees later it is still running great !), 16 inch bar (which can cut a 20"+ diameter tree) with 56 links (this may not seem like important information, but when you go to replace the chain , the links have to match the bar or else you will break a tooth on the bar and the chain will not move, thus you will have to replace the bar).
