It’s officially spring and with that came cleaning up (and burning) dead trees and brush in one of the pastures. As I just mentioned, our overall goal was to clean the dead trees out of the pasture and burn them – Without burning the rest of the pasture. It worked.. Pretty well.. At first!
After a little while, there was a sort of rhythm that took over: Cut the tree
Let the tree fall and then in comes the skidloader!
The skidloader picks it up and proceeds to the brush pile. Sounds simple, right? Yep!
Some of the reasons we were cleaning up these trees were because: a) They were dead (or almost dead) b) They were right next to the fence and the first good springtime thunderstorm we have would topple them right over, take down the fence and block the road! (We actually ended up taking down a portion of the fence so we could finish cutting down a couple of trees. But that’s a whole other thing.) and lastly, c) because the guys wanted them gone!
Time for the halftime break – About this time all the gals went and sat up on the hill in the grass and watched for awhile as the guys continued to work. We needed a break. We’d been doing double time and figured it was okay to let the guys continue to work and try to catch up with our productivity level.. You believe me, right? Of course you do!
About this time, Deacon decided to go kill a snake and come prancing up to us with it as he slung it around and around… He sent a couple of the little people scurrying to the other side of the fourwheelers!
After our little break, we took pity on the poor guys having to work out there all by themselves and went back to help with starting the backfire. A backfire is what you use to create a barrier of already burned grass so that when the bigger fire is started and reaches the backburn (where the backfire was) it runs out of fuel (dried grass, brush, etc) and can’t go any farther!
It usually works.. Most of the time.. Unless your backburn isn’t big enough.. Which ours wasn’t.
Part of my job was spreading the backfire around the fire pile and then one of the guys would come along with a sprayer and put it out when it’d gone far enough.
And then we lit the big fire pile! The heat from it was amazing and apparently a bit too much for our backburn as the fire pile sent sparks jumping over it and into the dry grass on the other side. This in turn led to another fire starting in the ditch and taking off with the wind while feeding on dry grass and brush. How fun!
But, with several buckets of water, a small sprayer, and some pitchforks it was put out and everything went back to the way it was before – Smokey and dirty! We let the big fire burn awhile before heading up to the house to clean up and grab some homemade meatloaf.
Summing it all up, the clean-up went pretty well! We got rid of the trees, burned the brush pile, and most importantly – Nobody was fried during the clean up and burning of this pasture!
Ashleigh
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