Clearing Land in the West

Our family took an extended vacation to the west this summer. We spent several days in Idaho and helped friends clear some forest land for their future garden plot.

The soil of the west seems very different than the soil where we currently live. Of course it was dry the time of year we visited. The soil in some areas of the west seems very fine, and perhaps of high clay content. It would readily make billowing dust with each foot step. In disturbed areas that were dry, it seemed there was 6 inches of fine dust powder.

 The forest we were clearing was almost entirely conifer. There was a mix of young and old trees in the span. Based on several days of work on it, I estimated that there were about 20 trees in a 20 x 20 foot grid. We were able to process around 4 trees per hour not counting the stump. These 4 hours included the felling of the tree with a chain saw, getting it dislodged from nearby trees and on the ground, de-limbing it, and rounding the trunk to specific lengths for stacking. The effort involved in working with the stump is much as in the East. The larger the stump, the more effort required to pull it out of the ground. With light to medium equipment, I would estimate that you could extract a stump and hour.

So to total this up: for a 20 x 20 plot, you would need to spend 5 hrs removing the trees, 1 hr for stacking the logs, 20 hrs to remove the stumps and smooth the ground. If you could keep this up, to clear a 90 x 90 garden plot would take around 10 weeks.

Our experience in the West matched what we found when we cleared land in the East. The more machine muscle you can put into the process, the faster it can be done. Now is the time to get available land cleared and ready for garden production, while you have the potential of getting large equipment in to assist in the hard tasks such as stump removal. It is possible that in some areas you could swap the equipment work for the trees / lumber removed from the land, lowering your costs.