Julie Zickefoose on Blogspot: Epic Beautification 3: Hobbit House

One brushpile, I don't burn. Two reasons: It's out at the end of the orchard, and burning it would certainly start a forest fire. Second, it is made up of dead wood and fallen limbs, with no brushy invasives or vines laden with seeds. Those all get hauled to the burn piles.

The orchard is very long, as long as the oil road, and I need someplace to put the limbs and logs that fall across the lanes and keep the brushhog from doing its job of keeping the rose and honeysuckle cut down. So here it is, and here it has been for many years. Lately it has begun to look intentional, beautiful, even. I didn't mean to do that. It just happened, when the logs I cut this fall were too big and heavy for me to hoist, when the pile got so tall I could no longer throw things like that up onto it. Just a couple of good windstorms will bring down enough limbs and logs to do that.

While the guys were mowing and cutting dead trees, I was unearthing and cutting up logs that my Amish crew cut and pushed aside in 2019. The logs were keeping the Massey from getting into some rose thickets.

I'm hoping this becomes a home for bobcats or turkey vultures (who will nest on the ground under good shelter), foxes and skunks, groundhogs, rabbits, coyotes...maybe it already is. They might be using a back entrance.

Maybe hobbits or gnomes are living there. Something. I should put a trailcam on it!

Over time, it will melt down until I can again throw logs on top. That's how such things go.

There was a lot more to go on the giant meadow brushpile. Three of the Russian prunes that had held a thorny throne along my driveway for probably 50 years died in the ongoing drought. If there's anything worse than a Russian prune alive, it's a dead one. Their wood is hard, dense, unyielding. Their twigs are heavily thorned, stiff, springy. You cannot load a cart with Russian prune. It's like loading a cart with box springs. You have to drag it to its destination. And so I asked Walter and Timmy to cut the dead prunes down so they could use the Massey 135 to drag them down to the meadow brushpile.

Kevin, the tractor magician, secures a chain around the massive trunk of a 44-year-old Russian prune, then drags it to the brushpile, saving me literally days of work trying to top and process the stupid things. I know it was 44 years old because I counted the rings.

Magic!

Just like that, it's GONE!

Timmy went down to the pile and cut it into pieces he could hoist atop the mess. That was a heroic deed.

The shadows were getting long by the time he got that done.

OK.

Back to the brushpile du jour. Here it is after the meadow was mown on Nov. 9, the cut logs of the prune trees showing. (No, they never made prunes. They even stopped blooming as they got senescent in the last few years.)

It is almost the size, if not the height, of my house. It's going to be one hell of a fire. We're going to wait for exactly the right conditions, which will be calm conditions or a light wind from the south, to move the flames from the end near the woods up the hill toward the open meadow. It will need to have rained a lot within the last few days, and the ground should be damp. And we will have probably four people with shovels in a ring around the pile, waiting to catch any sparks.

While Kevin was mowing, some goldenrod seed-fluff built up on the hot manifold of the tractor and caught fire. He shut the tractor down and brushed the burning fluff to the ground. Where, of course, it took off. He stomped it all out and we had a good, if nervous, laugh about it. This is how wildfires happen! I am so grateful for this careful crew of men. I wouldn't think of trying to burn without them here.

We'll take no chances with this forest and my home. If we have to wait until February to burn, so be it.