April 2, 2016 Chipping Away

We spent the entire afternoon out at our homesteader's "Farm" yesterday burning tree debris. It was a nearly perfect day: seventy-two degrees, clear with a light northerly breeze. This is maybe our seventh burning day and burning the mix of wet(ish) berry vines, grasses, twigs, branches, and logs, takes some experience. Note to self: don't just push every damned thing into a pile and hope it will light on fire.

Even if tractor renting days are fun, and they are fun, the time restriction of renting a tractor which only has eight hours of actual work time makes for some bad decisions. This is an economic thing because it is based on a cost benefit analysis, leading us into short term gains and longer termed pains. We now have three large piles of mixed organic debris, totaling maybe two hundred cubic yards (loosely packed). Branches and logs poke out of the piles. The piles have been compacted, so everything is sort of woven together. Heavier things go to the bottom, so it looks from the outside as if the whole thing ought to light right up and burn to the ground. But this immediate success isn't what happened. Not everything just burns because of combined heat, air, and fuels.

We did a few successful burns in Winter, the first was a burn of paper trash from our forty-five foot shipping container full of trash. (You can find notes on this looking through the archive.) We found that it took three hours of sitting in the rain, with gasoline, to get paper to burn hot enough so that you didn't have to pour more gasoline on the fire. Eventually we broke the code and got about five yards of paper, magazines, books, mail, and cardboard to burn in a self sustaining manner.

Following on this we tried a few other times to get the wood debris piles to light up and get hot, but three hours following the same protocols didn't make any sort of a dent. Eventually we began to realize that burning in the winter, while it was raining or had been raining, was a nearly complete waste of time. But we had fun trying and a day on the Farm is better than a day not on the Farm.

The yard debris fire

The next time we got anything going we were simply lucky to get anywhere. I built a fire in a debris pile we had built of scraps from our landscape business, not stuff from the property. Three hours of cussing eventually got the thing lit up and "jetting" occurred for the first time. (A fire jetting up is what happens when the air gets through the fire and makes the excessive heat it take to burn cold, wet, wood.) Once we saw this we began piling light stuff onto the fire, which established a base of coals hot enough to sustain the fire no matter what we poured on. Eventually we made it through ten yards of debris before it got too dark to keep going.

The next successful burn happened after Tractor Day #3 (again, look in the archives). I had dropped a bunch of trees by pushing them over using a ten ton skid steer tractor, but the trees were too large to push into the ever debris growing piles. We got a break in the weather and it wasn't raining, even if the ground was still pretty soggy, so we decided to try. This time we had a plan to build a base fire on a steel screen of heavy wire mesh we found laying around somewhere (the crap lay everywhere). The hypothesis we were testing was that there was not enough air in the fire to allow jetting, ember pile building, excessive heat, and success.

We took twigs sized (1/4 inch or so) branches from a close by and gigantic plum tree, mixed these with paper from the shipping container, doused the thing with gasoline, and lit it up. As soon as the fire took off (jetting) we began loading branches, but I put stuff on that very new fire which was much too large and the fire faltered a bit; but eventually we got it back up to making hot coals and, with the help of Elliot (our cheap but mostly trusty chain saw that doesn't seem to like being called Elliot), we burned the hell out of a fifteen or so yards of plum tree and other wooden crap found laying all over the property. We began seeing the pattern of our behavior, learning seemed possible.

The Plum Tree Fire

A few weeks back we went out to test our new Theory of Fire with the certain knowledge that would allow us to light a really big pile up and, using fire as a tool, make our lives easier. The plan was simple enough: Build one fire, then another, then another, by the end of the day all of our pile related problems would be solved.

We built a fire right on the side of the enormous West Meadow Debris Pile, now  a monument to permanent pile making and so deserving a name of it's own. The fire took off right away (as planned), but the pile never caught on. Eventually we ran out of gasoline, and anything else that would burn, and so we had to get more. . .  At the gas station in Banks they sold wood pellets for pellet stoves as well as gasoline. These pellets are little rabbit turds of sawdust extruded into plastic bags weighing about thirty pounds. I bought one, thinking it might make good kindling (and what the heck) and we began making another fire on the side of the West Meadow Pile. The pellets worked the trick and got hot enough to burn nearly anything, but we still found ourselves having to carry wood into the fire anyway, the darned pile refused to cooperate. In the end we spent eight hours and burned only ten yards which didn't make much of a dent in our hundred yard pile.

We did learn some valuable maxims: "That is is more fun to try then not to try". "That being together trying was more fun than not trying alone". "That we would maybe need twenty or so of these ten yard burns to accomplish the task". "That it ought to be done maybe sometime this year if the weather cooperates and we have the time".

Yesterday I bought the pellets first. Brought all of Elliot's necessary fuels and oils. Got the screen set up. And the weather looked good. We built a fine little fire in about ten minutes and spent eight hours chopping away and the large pile of trees and stuff. We burned nearly twenty yards, maybe more.

We brought snacks, should have brought food. We brought lots of beer, should have brought more water. It was sunny, should have brought sunscreen. Don't call Elliot, but do call Elliot "Leo" or he won't start. Lessons learned.

Hagel called the search for true knowledge the "road to despair", he was right (there is no true knowledge, only patterns of regularity which we use to get by as we search for knowledge that ultimately will fail us). The regularities are piling up. Eventually, you should be able to see the flames of my fires from space.