Burning

We have gathered a lot of downed limbs from trees over the last couple of years and finally got around to burning them this week-end. We had to get a burning permit from the town and you have to call the fire station to make sure it is safe and that there aren't too many people burning that day. We passed all the tests and started moving the wood we'd gathered to our garden area where we would be doing the burning. The top picture shows a known fire bug getting things started. This is just a small portion of the huge pile of limbs and branches we would be burning. I should have taken a picture of the pile that we would be burning. It was at least five feet high and about fifteen feet across.

It took us many trips from the pile to the burning spot but it went pretty fast. In the second picture, you can see why we limited the amount of wood that was burning at any time. The wood was very dry and burned fast. We had buckets of water and our garden hose ready. The kids both helped a lot. They carried a lot of the branches from the storage pile to the burning site and they also took turns dowsing our neighbor's trees that overhang our fence (that he doesn't seem to want to trim back) in case burning ash or embers reached them. But we planned the burn well enough that there was little smoke and very few burning embers floating around.

You can't see it in the pictures but we had a number of pretty big unsplit logs about four or five inches in diameter and those were taking a long time to burn down. Since I didn't want to stand out there all day while they finished burning, I thought I'd try a trick a friend at work told me. He says he's used his leaf blower to get the fire burning really intensely and that it not only sped up the burning but created such an intense flame that it reduced big logs to ash pretty quickly. Well, I'm here to tell you that it really works! The final picture shows what we were left with. I had already turned the dirt over in our garden to help cool down the ash but you can see that only one two to three inch diameter branch is left and that was because it was on the edges of the burn.

A few cautions: When you first turn on the leaf blower, be careful. Ash will blow around until you get the nozzle pointing in the right direction. As the fire burns down the wood, it gets a lot lighter and can be blown around by the leaf blower stream. Also, don't forget that the fire will be really intense and hot and can melt the end of the leaf blower nozzle. You don't have to run the leaf blower continuously. Just a few minutes at a time is sufficient. You can almost see the big logs melting away as the blast furnace-like flames consume them. It's pretty amazing. We're allowed to burn until the end of April so there will probably be another fire in our garden before then. I'll try to get some pictures of the leaf blower doing its job and post them.