On Top of Old Smokey

 We ended up getting more than half an inch of rain.  A good soaking rain.  New York State imposes a burn ban every spring between March 15th and May 15th, so if we wanted this pile gone we had to get busy.  A pile of well soaked, greenish wood with a lot of wet Ash bark on top can be a bit of a challenge to light.  With about a dozen newspapers, a few gallons of diesel and a leaf blower, we managed to make fire.  A really dark, smokey fire.

Once it gets going it takes about an hour to burn down to something more manageable.  We still had a smaller pile to the side that had to be added by hand because the main pile was too tall for the loader to dump the branches on top in any sort of organized fashion.  And the neater and more compressed your pile, the quicker it will be gone.

At this point it is time to "police up" the edges and get the small twigs into the pile and rake any debris away so the fire does not spread.

Once the flames die down enough that you can get close to it for a moment, you have to push the unburnt ends into the center.  We wear heavy leather gloves and safety glasses.  My forehead is always covered with a bandana, and a flame resistant hoodie helps too.  Even so, you end up feeling a bit singed by the time its over.

When it gets down to smoldering coals it can be left unattended.  We check it periodically throughout the day, poking the coals and stirring them up so the heavier pieces that are not getting enough oxygen will continue to burn.  By the next morning it will be a small pile of warm ash.

So that was four straight days of spring clearing.  We got the most pressing trees out of the way but there will always be more cleanup.  That's what you get when you are surrounded by woods and try to maintain some natural areas up close to your lawns and gardens.  That is not the end of the dead Ash trees, but those are the ones that were affecting us the most and now we have a year's worth of campfire wood ready to split.  

Even though the trees took up many hours each day, I also managed to get some smaller spring chores checked off my list.  

• I sprayed my apple trees with dormant oil and copper fungicide.  
• Spread deer repellent around my crocuses.
• Removed the hardware cloth from my alliums.
• Replace the hardware cloth over the hyacinths with cloches.