Frost and Fire ~ Indian Summer

This October is proving to be another beautiful autumn.  The weather has turned again giving us a week of Indian Summer weather which is perfect for enjoying the last of the garden chores.

My dahlias survived several frosts and these frosts have had a beautiful effect on the trees.  Two of our yard trees have opposite patterns of leaf color.  The Firepit Maple turns yellow on the outside from the top down.

And Ole Hickory turns on the inside from the bottom up.

Each fall we always end up with a burn pile.  Each year we think we have done all of the major clearing and maintenance and this will be a year where we do not use the chain saw or create a burn pile.  We are always mistaken.

We waited until we had a cool rainy stretch, and at the end of it, when all of the grass is well saturated, we light the fire. My husband squirts Kerosene on it while we light it, and I apply the leaf blower and it instantly springs to life.  This pile six feet tall and very compact because twice as we were building it we crushed it down with the tractor loader.

We chose a beautiful clear day in the mid-40s with no breeze to speak of.  Burning in the cool weather of autumn is so much easier on the fire tenders than say July with the heat and humidity.

A fire such as this requires constant attendance for one to two hours.  I put my flame resistant hoodie on and we take turns raking with a leaf rake to get the loose leaves and twigs back towards the bare ground beneath the fire to prevent the grass from catching.  I remember one fire when conditions were much drier when we filled the tractor loader with water and used watering cans to douse the surrounding grass.  The ground is squishy at this point so there is little danger of the grass supporting much flame.

10 minutes

Even when the flames diminish, it is throwing heat off that you do not want to get your face close to.

20 Minutes

As the center burns we use a metal garden rake so push the unburned ends of limbs into the fire.

40 Minutes

The fire reduces to a manageable size quite quickly, and we enjoy sitting out in the nice weather.  Back when I built my potting bench and compost sifter from a pile of scrap wood, we still had a few boards leftover.  From that we built three simple camp stools to replace the stools that had rotted away over the last twenty years.

It is so peaceful out here watching the golden leaves drift lazily to the ground.

After an hour and a half the fire can be left unattended.  We continue to check back through the afternoon, pushing ends into the center and stirring the coals.  By morning this will be a cold pile of ash with nothing identifiable left.

The next morning there was a colder frost, and my Dahlias are beginning to die.

Next chore: digging dahlias 

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.