You may have assumed, by the title of this post, that I was going to talk about snow. Nope. Right now the sky is blue and the ground is dry.
As I have mentioned previously and probably too often, we live on five acres (five-point-two, to be more precise) out on the "high" desert of Central Oregon. (I don't know why it's called "high" .... I looked it up and learned "high desert" doesn't really mean anything at all .... )
When we purchased this land five years ago (OMGosh .... FIVE! ..... wow) it was completely uncleared. And the bulk of it remains uncleared. Which was the plan. Zero landscaping except just around the house. Leave it natural and organic. Easy peasy!
How naive, were we.
Now we are tasked with the noble plan each year of spending a good chunk of the winter months, removing anything that might become fuel for unwanted fires the following summer. Yup! By golly, it'll be a banner year taming the land! However, our plans usually whittle down to only a handful of days, if that. Because it's so easy to NOT do it. And because it's hard work.
We just had one of those noble days. Husband dusted off the chainsaw, hauled it outside, and buzzed off heaps of low branches from a few of our gazillion juniper trees. I pulled up (what seemed like) tons of mostly-rotted scrubby sage bushes and it all went on burn piles.
In western Oregon where the color green was born and perfected, the trees are real, and where I lived most of my life, if you cut fresh branches off living trees or shrubs and immediately try to burn them in the middle of winter, well .... good luck with that. You'll get more smoke than flames. Not the case here in the *high* desert, where even the saplings will promptly erupt into an inferno regardless of the season. No need to let firewood "age" if you plan to burn it in your fireplace. It's ready from the get-go.
And for an added thrill, you can top that burning pile of branches with some o' them thar dry tumbleweeds. Just keep a bucket of water close by.
We spent most of the day cutting, pulling, hauling, piling, and burning ..... and a relatively small portion of these 5.2 acres actually looks a little cleaner. (Until the cheat grass arrives this spring.) Afterwards we hobbled back to the house, soothed our aching muscles in our hot tub, and slathered on the Icy Hot.
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| Please tell me you can see the difference. |
The question remains if we will do any more this winter. The intentions are impressively lofty, but we'll see if those intentions bear fruit, so to speak. I'm especially good at dreaming up grand (and unlikely) ideas which include (but are not limited to) things like learning to use a chainsaw myself, building a cabin, buying a tractor, adding a second driveway, rearranging some boulders, and the like. But for now, a little more clearing will have to suffice, as boring as that is.
On the upside, we have enough free firewood for our wood stove to last into the next decade. It's just hanging around outside, thinking it's a tree, ready to be cut down, stacked, and burned that same afternoon. I'm keepin' the Icy Hot handy.
