More Brush Pile Burning

Another burn day, the hope was to get two more brush piles burned up to help the dozer folks to finalize the grading and start the digging of the pond. The day started out fine enough, I got the pile burning, plenty of dirt around the burn to prevent fire spreading and burning started at 11:00 am.

The first pile I started was the biggest, it was also kind of loosely piled, so I spent some time clearing area and trying to keep the fire fed.

So I'm new to this pile burning stuff, but come 2:00 pm (3 hours) the pile had hardly been burned down, so I started trying to push the pile onto itself to get more material burning. Around 3:00pm, the fire was well on its way to burning. I also discovered that the tractor burns more gasoline than I figured, after running out of gas while it's sitting in the burn pile and having to add gas to the tractor in the burn pile. I decided I need more gas, lots more gas. Unfortunately I only had a five gallon gas can, so I made one trip to the gas station to fill up the can, filled up the tractor then made another trip to fill the gas can again and fill another 5 gallons in the tractor. Once last trip to fill the gas can so I have a reserve in case it runs out of gas in the burn pile again.

After all this back and forth to the gas station it was not 4:30 pm and I'm needing to start thinking about winding this thing down before I lose light and also need to get home, however the burn pile is still burning strong. I spent the next 2 1/2 hours trying to kill the fire and around 7:15 finally get the fire put out and smoldering enough so I can leave it for tomorrow.

So one thing I take away from this, is work the fire and work it early, keep the fire fed early so it burns majority of material and you're left with just small stuff that's easy enough to extinguish if only one day to work burn file. The other thing I learned is that if you're gonna burn, be prepared to stay the night if necessary when burning.