The long weekend was spent controlled burning & cutting downed limbs & trees into firewood.
There have been a lot of grassfires lately &, as spring & summer get here, the risk will go up, anytime we go a stretch between rains. With the years of leaf littler & fallen branches, a fire would rip through here so quickly there would be no way to contain it, so we made some fire lines, did some back burning, and cleaned it all up--with fire, of course.
The Cottage property is adjacent to the highway, which leaves opportunity for accidental ignition from things like tossed cigarettes, in addition to the fact that multiple arsons have been happening around here every year going back a good minute. And, as I think I mentioned when we were clearing trees for the house, a fire had previously swept through here some years back, which is why so many of the trees we cut were already dead.
So, in order to protect The Cottage & The Cabin, we burned the years of leaf litters & underbrush on the west acre, where the buildings set. We also cut up most of the downed limbs that were still in good enough condition to use as firewood--there's still a few left that we couldn't get to until we burned out the brush around them, but they'll be cut up soon enough.
This should created a fire line to help reduce our chances of a fire coming through here, as it won't have nearly as much fuel to spread. This, of course, won't help if it's a forest fire, spreading from the neighbors trees, but it's definitely a precaution worth taking. And, bonus, having everything between the trees cleared out will greatly reduce the work we need to do in order to build the fence we need in order to get chickens.
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