Relative Something

I think there was finally a perceptible shift in the drying of things around here. The holes that were drilled for the hay shed are still full of water, but there are other areas that are showing signs of being dry for the first time all spring. Portions of the sand that was brought in for our new driveway loop are drying up and getting very hard. Some of the clay that got knocked off the drill bit of the skid loader has dried, and seems like a chunk from a broken ceramic pot.

The most vivid example was in the behavior of the burning brush pile. Elysa was helping me to drag dead and dried branches out of the woods, and down to fuel the burn of the pile. Each time we tossed more wood on the fire, we tried to move the primary target of burn further into the pile. I had worked all morning, and she arrived to help me haul multiple loads in the afternoon, and the progress was meager, gaining ground on a relatively small percentage of green branches remaining in the pile.

I had hoped to see the bulk of the branches knocked down by the end of the weekend, but it was looking less likely, as we began to run out of steam for hauling. While we stood watching the last load we had added begin to ignite, it was as if someone flipped a switch. Maybe it was the two days of wind, and all that sunshine on Sunday, and things finally dried to a point of combustion. Without a hint of what was about to happen, the fire picked up momentum and proceeded to light up the whole of the remaining center of the pile.

It happened so fast, I didn’t get around to pulling out my camera. It was a dramatic spectacle, and thoroughly entertaining, bordering on scary. It was definitely beyond our control for a while there. That fire was going to do whatever it wanted to, and we wouldn’t have been able to stop it. Luckily, there was nothing around the pile but open pasture, and the bulk of fire energy was rising straight up, with little in the way of ash.

And, most of the area is still pretty wet. It is dry enough to burn brush piles, but not dry enough to dig post holes.

By the time we finished, that pile looked more like a little volcano than a brush pile. Now they need to turn over some of that dirt with their skid loader and reshape things, knocking out the roots from the soil. We made great progress, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a bunch of wood that will need to be burned. I don’t know how long conditions will continue to be acceptable for burning, but I think I will be striving to make it more of a controlled burn when we get around to working on the remainder of what’s there.