Kate Butler's Google page provides a good illustration of the point I was going to make, which is that...
Anyone know where i can find a good source of info on building a solar home and what size lot i need to clear to catch enugh sun
"...solar home..." can mean a lot of different things. Many moons ago, while I was still in school, I spent a lot of time investigating and testing a variety of solar technologies, both active and passive, everything from focusing collectors (even participated in building a large working model of one, was able to drive absorption cycle refrigeration using throttled 300F steam coming off the thing; ahh, the good old days), to flat plate collectors, to passive solar including earth-bermed houses, etc., etc.
Bottom line is that there's a huge number of options, and huge amounts of information available via the internet, and you're going to need to spend some time researching before deciding on what's the best fit. This will depend greatly on your budget (as jefeVTtreeman noted, a lot of these technologies have high first costs), and on site considerations (as foodforests describes, you need to understand when and where you'll get sun and when and where you won't), and on your goals, which at this point maybe aren't well defined.
Due to the immense amount of info you'd need to absorb to get to a point where you could do this right, you might consider finding a reputable experienced company to render professional recommendations.
By the way, the reason I ultimately abandoned my pursuit of solar was that none of them could be shown to be "economically viable", which simply means that in the commercial world, if you can't show a 1-2 year payback, the customer wouldn't buy it. Most of the technologies I investigated had paybacks in the 5-10 year range, with some of them as high as 20. The scenario has probably improved somewhat over the past 25 years, but if it had become truly viable, you'd be seeing lots more of it. In other words, you've got to simply want to do it and be willing to live with high first cost and long payback.