Jay’s Brush Clearing

(207) 501-3510

Meet Jay

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What's your favorite type of job

I gotta say, I grew up on a farm. I love working with farmers. I love working with anyone who has a large piece of property that they want to make sure they maintain very well for any reason, but I like doing fence lines, doing things like that. That’s a lot of fun, doing larger projects like that. But that said, I also love to help a homeowner who has just had this backyard that’s been overgrowing for years, and the look on the face of homeowners who realize what their property can be is really a powerful thing.

When should I clear my property?

So it’s really a personal choice, I would say. It’s when you want to bring your land back, when you want to be using your land again. So, we all could just let our land grow. If we’ve got our property, you can always just let it go wild, if you will. But if you want to bring something back that is overgrown or has turned into kind of like a thicket or has maybe been some invasive shrubs and things like that, you just don’t want to be on your property. I think that’s when you know that maybe it’s maybe time to clear things out. What I find is that a lot of people know they want to clear their land. What they don’t know is that my service is available and that this style of service is available. I’ve met a lot of folks who say, you know, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do for years with this overgrown patch of my property. And now that I see what you can do, they get very excited about the finished result and what they can have back.

Do you work in all weather?

We do work, I’d say nine months out of the year up here in Maine, New Hampshire. So we can do things in the wintertime, but right now we typically do most of our work between April and December. And we just want it to be dry enough where we’re not going to leave any ruts or make a mess on the property. The goal of this entire business is to make property more beautiful. So the last thing I want to do is leave a bunch of muddy ruts. So we have to maneuver our schedule a little bit once in a while when we get some really wet periods. So generally, being dry is preferred.

Does brush clearing improve safety?

Anytime you have overgrown land, there’s potential for issues as far as someone who tries to walk through it. They could get cut, they could get scratched up, you could fall, you could get hurt, it could be stumps, it could be anything that’s underneath that you may not see if you’re trying to go walk through a piece of forest or something like that. So there’s hazards there. There can be hazards as far as things that might fall from above if you’ve got some overgrowth as well. Anything that’s old or dead. I find that a lot. Dead trees, dead things that may be leaning or are just in a precarious position. You’re always better off removing those things for safety of anyone who wants to use the land.

How do I get a quote?

I reply very quickly. So as soon as someone reaches out to me, I want to be replying within an hour or two and just starting a conversation. And then I try to get up to the property as soon as I can. So within a couple of days. And once I’m out there, then we can have a good discussion, figure out the goals for the project. My turnaround time that I aim for for my quotes is 24 hours. So once I’m on your property, 24 hours later, you should have a quote in hand or a quote by email that lays out. Oftentimes I’ll give some options as well. So we had a property recently where a homeowner said, know I have a budget and I want to make sure that I don’t go over that budget I’ve got a lot of stuff I’d like to do what are my options and so I gave them a three-tiered quote I said you know you can we can kind of do our good better best if you want to look at it that way as far as what we can leave you with we can do things in phases so again working with homeowners is one of my favorite parts to try to figure out the real scope of the project. And then once I’ve got the scope or the the quote in your hand and you say you want to go forward, then we get you on the books. And we try to do that within two to four weeks, I would say. It depends on the time of year. Sometimes if we’re really busy, it might be pushed out a little bit longer. I’m also keeping an eye on the weather forecast very often. I have a bit of a background in aviation, so weather is a big thing that I try to keep an eye on because I want to make sure I’m doing the job at a time that makes the most sense. And it may not be ideal if we have to push it out because of a big rain event, but I want you to know that we are making sure that your land is treated properly. So from start to finish, from Dave contacting me to having your job done can be as little as two to three weeks. And yeah, I try not to waste any time if I can help it.

How do you approach each job?

I do a thorough walkthrough. So all of our estimates are free, and I’ll come out to your property and walk with you, and we can determine what your goals are. That’s the biggest thing I ask is, what’s your vision? What do you want to see at the end of this project? And for everybody, it’s different. So we don’t always clear land completely. Sometimes we want to leave things. And so we can develop that together as we walk through and look at the project. And I’ll just give my best advice if someone asks me my opinion. But otherwise, I’m trying to really take guidance from the property owner as far as what their vision and goals are for the project.

How does clean brush improve appearance and value?

I like to provide my clients with before and after photos so you can really see side by side just how much of a difference it makes. It’s incredible. If you’re doing it for restoration of a view, that’s one thing where it really starts to pop where you say, wow, I used to just see shrubs and trees and overgrowth and leaves. Now I can see this beautiful river or field or something that I used to see before. It’s really incredible to walk up to a piece of property that has been mulched and see what it can turn into.

What does a bad brush clearing job look like?

The mulch itself is really where you can see the difference. That’s where the quality is. So if you look at a piece of property that has been mulched with a machine like ours, you can put your hands through it and it’s soft. You can pick it up. You can walk on it. You could walk on it probably barefoot sometimes, depending on how rocky it is and things like that. You get a really fine finished product. But I have seen lots of jobs I get to where some previous mulching has been done, and it’s large chunks of wood. It’s large pieces of stumps. It’s large pieces of branches. And you have to continue, you have to go through and do more work just to pull all that stuff out of there. So if you find that or if you have experience with that, that is not what mulching needs to be. Mulching can be a very fine finished product. Assuming that you don’t have a lot of rocks, and we walk around and determine this too. Rocks can be a big factor. Again, we’re in New England. Our machine, we can get through areas that have some rocks, but they pose their own challenges. But if you have an area where there’s not a lot of big boulders or things taking out, we can get it to be a beautiful finish that’s very fine. Again, it comes down to machinery and experience and making sure you choose someone who has a proper machine and a proper amount of experience.

What problems can overgrown land cause?

One of the biggest problems that a lot of folks are not aware of is that a lot of shrubs, shrubs and vines, especially invasive ones, and we have a lot up here in New England, in Maine, New Hampshire. Japanese Barberry is a big one, Buckthorn, Bittersweet. There’s a long list, maybe five or six that I see very commonly. And what you may not know is that they actually can harbor ticks. So a lot of shrubs, especially when they start to get to a certain height or size where they can get very thick, and it’s generally the invasives that are doing this, they will create a habitat that is ideal for ticks, for mice that carry ticks, for rodents that carry ticks. So one of the things that I find that is a surprise to a lot of homeowners is that we can help to reduce the tick population of your property by removing invasive shrubs and overgrown areas where the ticks might thrive. When it gets to be too big, and this mostly happens with trees, I can handle any shrubs and brush and small saplings. You know, they could be up to 10 or 15 years old, as long as they are in a certain size range as far as the diameter of the tree trunk. Anything that is a shrub or an invasive typically is going to be still have to be small. Even if it’s very old, it’ll have small branches, and those can be taken care of at any age. It really comes down to trees. So when you start having trees that get bigger and older and taller, I recommend any tree that is larger and kind of out of our capacity of what I might consider to be brush, then I recommend a licensed arborist. But otherwise, very commonly, fields and overgrowth is happening for 10, 15, sometimes 20 years. And so it’s never too late is what I would say. Even if it’s been many, many years, I can take care of all of the small stuff, get nice and cleared out, and that makes the job easier for an arborist who might come in later to do work on some of the larger trees.

What mistake do property owners make doing it themselves?

A lot of folks will try to clear land by slowly over time, chopping down some trees or small bushes or doing whatever they can to gather all the things they want to get rid of and they’ll make a big pile. So the old brush pile. A lot of folks will start to build a brush pile and it might be years and years or at least they keep adding to this brush pile. And now you have to decide, all right, I’ve had this huge sometimes eyesore on my property. What do I want to do with it? Burning it can be very dangerous, especially if you’re near trees and things like that in a dry season. And then sometimes people just get flustered and say, I don’t know what to do. How do I take care of this? And so we can certainly come in and take care of it for you. What I do find is that you’re better off having us come in sooner than later. So by the time your brush pile gets to be huge, it just makes more hours of us having to pull it apart and tackle it to mulch it down. It still, in the end, is the best way to go, in my opinion, as far as otherwise trying to have it hauled off. But, yeah, I think that’s the thing that happens the most is these brush piles that get out of control, but we have to try to tackle and remove.

What should I look for in a brush clearing company?

Try to get an idea of what this company has done in the past and who’s running it, who’s doing the actual work in the machine. What I have found is that this, again, is a specialized machine, so it does require a lot of skill. And so you just want to make sure that you’re working with someone that you trust, that you can verify that they’ve done this previously and that they’ve done a good job. So look for those before and after photos. Look for projects that have been done. And yeah, and just make sure that you feel right about who you’re choosing. to do the work for your own property.

What's the difference between landscaping and brush clearing?

Very different things. Usually landscaping happens after. So professional brush clearing is when you have overgrown land that you want to be brought down to bare land that you can then go in and landscape. And I sometimes use the analogy, my machine is almost like a magic eraser. So you can look at a piece of property and say, hey, I want to envision, I’m envisioning something I want to do here. I want to put some landscaping. I want to make this pretty. The first step is to call us. We’ll come out and clear everything down to bare ground. And then you could just have a clean blank slate to start from for landscaping.

What equipment do you use?

It is called a forestry mulcher. And so what this machine does is it spins. It looks like a big rototiller. If you’ve ever seen a rototiller on a farm or taking care of a garden. And this machine will go through and spin very fast. It’s very powerful. And it will essentially turn anything from a six to eight inch tree down to bushes and shrubs and overgrowth into mulch, into a very fine mulch. It’s the kind of thing where once I go through and you look at the ground, All you really see is a nice, smooth, finished, mulched soil that you could pretty much just plant grass or something in directly if you wanted to. It’s kind of that smooth. So it’s really impressive for me to see how well this machine works.

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