Tuesday, November 16, 2010

It's about time!

Well, it's been three years since the last time we set fire to our burn pile.  Three years of accumulating waste wood.  Three years of taking up a bigger and taller spot in our side yard.  Time to get rid of it!

It was a misty damp day, a good day for burning.


Almost too damp.  I always have a hard time getting a burn pile started, so this time we used both old motor oil and kerosene.  It worked.


Lots of smoke from damp rotten hay.


A good start for getting rid of all that wood.


Starting to make a nice bed of coals.


Younger Daughter and her friend Miss Calamity decided to roast some hotdogs for dinner.


We started this burn pile on Sunday and now, on Tuesday, it's still burning, slowly working its way through piles of damp sawdust that have accumulated.  Let it burn!

6 comments:

  1. I am glad it did not get away with the high winds last night.
    We are building a house now and the contractor and some of his subs use the scrap lumber in their woodstoves (nothing glued or treated). We have a decent size pile that we will use in ours and in our outdoor fire pit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. enjoy that fire, as my memory turns to outdoor fires being made illegal in my last homesteads area, mostly to keep the local neo mafia trash collectors politicians bribes coming, i assume..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good thing you are not over in WA state--they would have thrown you in jail for lighting that on fire.

    No Wait--I take that back--IF you applied for a permit first and paid a fee they would have let you burn a portion of that fire that measures this many inches by this many inches AND there can be no household waste in the fire, only paper and wood AND as long as you agreed to have your hose within X amount of feet of the fire and 911 ready on your phone in case you need to call for help to figure out how to spray the water from the hose onto the fire to contain it.

    When I was growing up down there in WA we had bonfires all the time; those days are some of my best memories of time spent outside with my family.

    Now there are days when burn bans are in effect and you can't even use your indoor woodstove unless it is your sole source of heat. My parents live on 5 acres in WA state, yet when they want to burn anything outdoors on their own property they make sure to keep the fire inside a small circle and just put a few small branches and scraps on it at a time so nobody calls the fire department on them.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very funnie Grandma Tillie! The EPA is just about to get involved now since the Messsiah cannot get cap and tax the way HE wanted it. Get ready for government beaurocracy to be unleashed against you. I fondly remember standing around a fire nearly all night and shootin' the breeze.

    ReplyDelete
  5. G-ma T: I'm in the woods here on the peninsula, and I know what you mean about the changes in how we do our burn piles. We don't have to worry about the heating restrictions they put on folks in the Seattle region, but we do make a point of keeping our permits current. The wisdom of that became strikingly clear one morning earlier this year when I saw a burn get out of control on a remote property not far from here. It happened really fast. The homeowner was (ahemmcoughcough) relatively new to country life, and in a moment of inattention things got hot and hinky in a hurry. Had the 911 response not been as fast as it was you'd quite possibly have been hearing about us on that evening's network news.
    This past July 4th our deputies had to go root out a group of partyers who were visiting from the city...ahem...and had made camp just across the river. They'd brought an arsenal of high powered fireworks, which they proceeded to shoot up toward the mountainside where we live. Oh yes, girl. They did. I know. It wasn't like this when we were kids. More folks lived in the country as compared to the city, and common sense was more abundant. And there were fewer people, which is also a factor, I'm sure.
    Fortunately most folks here are like us, and don't require a nanny government leash to restrain them from mindlessly destroying themselves and others, but the folks who currently dominate the process of making the rules and calling the shots are the city folks in Olympia and Seattle, the common source of the people who come here and create problems. It has such a circular elegance, doesn't it? Thus we now live in one of the nation's biggest and most politically correct police states, quiet as it's kept.

    I need to shut up and go make a few quarts of applesauce.

    I think I can still do it without a permit...at least for now.

    A.McSp

    ReplyDelete
  6. Just don't use too much energy whipping up that applesauce A.McSp. Big Bro may soon be looking over your shoulder. Don't you just love all this technology that will help you to see the light?

    ReplyDelete