Cool Day Yard Clean Up

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We had a few mornings that started out in the 50s. I chose one of them to clean up the accumulated pile of sticks and branches (mostly forsythia but some redbud, maple, and hackberry) on the patio under my deck. The pile has been accumulating all during the summer and was, mostly, dry enough to burn easily although there were dried leaves attached to some of the branches.

I put a small pile of dry grass in the bottom of the chiminea and then piled on some bundled sticks before using a fireplace lighter to ignite the grass. The blaze started and I kept it going by feeding in more bundles of twigs. The bundles are mostly from a branch that I break and turned back on itself enough times to produce a bundle that would fit into the chiminea easily. I learned to sit down for much of the bundle creation to keep my back from hurting too soon/much.

The pile was large, and I realized after an hour or so of burning, that the ashes were building up in the chiminea and were taking up too much space to easily fit in more bundles to burn. Most of the branches were small diameter…but there were a lot of them and ashes built up. I closed the screen on the chiminea and watched as the flames died down and then the red glow begin to fade.

I stirred the ashes to try to make sure the sticks burned as completely as possible. It will be a few days before the ashes are cool enough to remove from the chiminea….and then I can clean up the last of the accumulated sticks and branches.

Annual stick/pinecone yard clean up

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The chiminea left by the previous owner of our house comes in handy for burning sticks and pinecones that would otherwise be difficult to get rid of. The sticks come mostly from our neighbor’s river birch (the tree sheds into our side yard every time we have a strong wind!) but there is a mixture of crape myrtle and oak….and some branches trimmed from the forsythia last season that were thoroughly dried in their pile under a pine tree. The first two fires were all sticks! Most of them broke into short enough pieces easily enough but a few poked out the opening of the chiminea until they burnt enough that I could slide them the rest of the way in. The mornings were cool enough that I enjoyed watching the fire burn. My husband asked why I smelled like smoke when I came inside!

As I trimmed some lower branches off our largest pine, I realized that there were way too many pine cones and that I was going to need to burn some of them – particularly the ones that had fallen onto grass rather than the carpet of needles directly under the tree; otherwise the lawn mower was going to be challenged by them every time I mowed in the upcoming months.

I piled the cones into a wagon along with the forsythia sticks (which had broken easily into short lengths) and loaded the chiminea with the sticks and half the cones for the third fire of the season. I lit a paper towel wadded under the sticks to start the fire.

It was an interesting fire to watch. The forsythia sticks and most of the cones caught fire easily although some of the cones might have been damp enough to slow their burning. As the fire progressed, I enjoyed the movement of the flames…the shape of the cones and the way they changed from their brown color to black with glowing red crescents to black and white…and then ash. I added the rest of the pinecones once most of the initial load had burned….and they caught quickly. After they had burned down, I stirred the ashes and was surprised at the chunks that still hadn’t burned. I closed the screen on the chiminea and watched the fire die before I went inside – realizing how much I had enjoyed photographing the pinecone fire.