After the storms that had passed through just recently brought down some trees and branches around the yard (luckily not damaging anything), it was time to start the cleanup work. Most of this stuff was dried out long dead tree material so it was pretty much seasoned enough that it should light up pretty quickly. We started off in the chicken yard. The ole lady moved the sections of branches from the chicken yard, staging them outside the gate while I grabbed my saws. After all that material was moved out, I started cutting the branches up into shorter pieces so I can stack them tightly on top of one another around the garbage that I already had staged at the burn pile site. After cutting up the branches into smaller pieces and starting the burn pile stack around the trash I turned my attention to a couple of smaller branches that fell right behind the 51 Chevy. This of course didn't take long since the branches were small so from there I turned my attention to the fallen tree at the back of the yard by the fuel shed. This would of course be a bit of work not just because of the large amount of material that would have to be cut down into smaller pieces for stacking on the burn pile but because I would have to walk all of this crap around the yard over to the burn pile. Basically I'd get a workout in this part of the job. Some of the sections of wood are larger diameter branches, around 2-3 inches diameter, which instead of cutting up and staging on the burn pile I just cut them down enough to make it easy to move and stacked them with the pile of wood that I recently moved for further cutting and splitting and stacking in the future. The larger trunks of the tree that fell haven't been cut up, as I wanted to focus on getting rid of the "garbage" first before I focus exclusively on cutting up the larger material for firewood. Things are being done in stages. I managed in the day to clear probably half of the branches from the area, making a good sized burn pile. With the pile done and a good section of area cleared, I took time to go ahead and fire the pile. It was coming up to a point in the day that I was about ready to quit but I wanted to get the pile burnt down since I still have more crap to cut up and stack later. Since the burn pile was large I wanted to stick around for a minute while the stuff burned itself down a good ways before walking away. Since my pre-cut wood pile is literally 12 ft away from the burn pile, I had to drag the hose to have it staged to wet down the wood while the fire burned so it didn't cause a possible spontaneous combustion condition. Again since the wood was dry and dead, it took fire really fast once the garbage started really burning. I stacked the wood in a teepee style configuration so as the flames crept up through the sticks and branches everything took to fire in no time and sucked air in, fueling the flames, allowing for fast consumption of the dead wood in probably 30 minutes. In the mean time I did take time to split up another one of the large cut logs that was on the wood pile. I may as well since it would be a waste of time just sitting there watching wood burn. With the wood burnt down, I can now cut and stack another pile of detritus from the back area and finish up clearing the smaller garbage wood before pulling out the big saw to cut the trunks up so I can have the pleasure of splitting some more huge logs along with the rest of the stack of wood. At least from the way things are going I'll have all this mess cleaned up pretty fast unlike the March 2020 storm damage where it took me several months to get all the trees cut up and split and stacked. The work continues...
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