One Year Later---Ice Storm Clean Up Continues

It was a year ago yesterday that the big Ice Storm hit our area. Since this January 12th was much nicer than that day, I decided to spend some time burning a couple of little brush piles. These are from the big maple that is across the fence from me. I had planned to burn them before putting the breeding group in there this fall, but by then there was a luscious stand of grass growing around the piles and I didn't want to damage any of that precious stuff. So these little piles have been settling and drying out and providing chewy toys for the sheep for a year. We got around five inches of rain last week, so they were a bit difficult to get started. I kept using all those old feed sacks that pile up and soon they were both blazing away. While I kept an eye on the burning, I raked and cleaned up the area around them. I got a bunch more little pieces of kindling for my wood stove and cleaned up about two buckets worth of bricks and cement block pieces. Now I'm not sure what the sheep were doing, but I had all these bricks and block pieces piled out of the way, but by the time I took the sheep out there, they had scattered them all over the place. Sheep soccer perhaps?

Unfortunately there was a stiff wind that came up later in the evening and I had to douse the glowing piles with water, so I have some charcoal bits to clear away now. However, once that is done, this little section will be ready for reseeding in the Spring. It's really nice to have the brush piles gone. I have two more that are lots bigger that need to be burned as well. Those will be a little more scary though.