I Almost Burnt It Down

BPO3 is supported by Timber King sawmills. For more information on my 1220 CRZ mill or one of many Foley hydraulic options, go to TimberKing.com. Holy moly. Oh, I'm getting pelted with dust. Gotta put safety glasses on. We got a storm rolling in and the storm front is about to get us. Look at these trees just bending. So this storm is not a producer of tornadoes, so a low risk of tornadoes, but one report said 80 mile per hour wind gusts, which I'm not too sure on that. The next report and radar as I was watching the storm about to hit us, wind gusts were 37 to 40 miles an hour. Wow. Look at those bending back there. Crazy. Yeah. My truck is under the trees. I gotta go move that. Holy cow. Yeah, let me go move the truck. It's that time to do my least favorite thing in the world, which is weed eating. Actually, there's one thing that I hate more than weed eating and that's diarrhea. Here's a pro tip for you. Go ahead and weed eat and you'll find more watermelon. This thing was covered up inside the weeds, although the bottom side was all disgusting and full of ants and whatnot. So I think I'm just going to wheel this one over to the compost station where I'm weed eating. No, I'm not doing that today. I'm not tackling that today. We are weed eating the log bed for a specific reason, and that is we got more wood chips, not from the same source this time. So I got two loads of wood chips right here, ready to go. There's several tree service companies coming out to our area now because of the whole ice storm thing we had back in February, January, and they're wide open. So I just, if I see them out there working, I'll go out there and try and respectfully talk to somebody without breaking their work and say, hey, what are you guys doing with these wood chips? So I contacted two more tree service companies. The first one, they said that they'll drop off some firewood. And I'm like, all right, cool. So they dropped off some firewood. It was full of debris, some pieces of brick, cinder block, all the branches were still on the limbs. It was very dirty and trash, like all their daily trash was in there. That was kind of a learning experiment. I don't want to have anything like that going forward. So I passed on tree service company number two. Tree service company number three, they're working right up the road. And they said, yeah, we're looking for a place to dump. So we got two loads from them. They said they're going to be back later today. First load was last week. Second load was today. And then they're supposed to get another one today. So great. Now we have two different sources of wood chips. We've got what we call the orange chips because it's an orange truck that's dumping and the white chips because it's a white truck that's dumping. So this is all white chips, the white truck delivery. And these are like 90% as good as the orange chip delivery. The orange truck, their chipper is superior because there's very few sticks and whatnot in here. And there's the white truck. We got a bunch of these in here, which they'll still break down. That's totally fine. There's a big limb sticking out right there. And it looks like there's one buried right here. So not the best quality, but I mean, like 90% as good as the other one. And hey, we'll take it. That was the main motivating factor to weed eat around the first log bed. Jamie's already raked up a bunch of that to throw in the compost. But once the weeds are knocked down considerably, we're going to pack the perimeter with wood chips because we've noticed if you just dump the wood chips on top of already established grass and whatnot, it doesn't really knock them back. But if you knock them back first and then pile the wood chips on, it's fantastic. The wood chips stop vegetation from growing, coming through. So I'm going to swap out the grapple for the bucket on the tractor and move all these around. And then I'll jump on the mini skid and put a bunch more in the garden pathway. Correction, the bucket is already on the mini skid and the grapples on the tractor. So I'm just going to stick with the mini skid for right now. I lit a fire like a week and a half ago and it hasn't smoked in days. Let this be a lesson that it'll smolder and just sit there, buried, retaining heat. Like I said, it hasn't even smoked in like five days. It's been so long. I started up getting a couple scoops out of here. I'm like, oh, the fire's done. Scoops. We'll go into the log bed and that'll be good for it, right? Well, about five, 10 minutes later, the rest of the stuff that's just chilling here started igniting. Like, okay, okay. Well, then the stuff that I put in here started smoking. I'm like, oh man, what did I just do? So Jamie went and got a couple buckets of water from inside. I filled up the bucket of this with the garden hose real fast. We dumped it on there, but about half my water didn't make it because it's so bumpy, you know. Everything's nice and wet now, so hopefully it won't flare up. But I'm going to be here for the rest of the night, so I'll monitor it. So yeah, I knew that hot coals can just sit there and smother and hold their heat for so long underground. Like I said, there's been no smoke for like five days. It's rained twice since then, and there you go. Proof is in the pudding. Be careful. Ah, so much ash and crap all over the lens. Now that I know that this is still hot and smoking, I think it makes sense for me to just go ahead and stir it all up. Let the rest of the organic matter in there burn if it wants to burn. I'll do that real quick. Spread it out quite a bit. Driving over the top of it, you can feel it's a little bit warm. It's not like unbearably warm, but you can feel it's still doing its thing right there. It's still got a lot of heat trapped in there. So I thought I only had one, I thought I only had one of these root balls left. I got two from the original clearing left. It's going to rain two days from now all day long, so getting this spread out makes me feel a little bit better. But I think I'm going to be done burning here. I'm going to take these bigger sections and just chuck them off in the woods. They can rot away. That is a lot of pretty good material that we're going to start pulling from probably another two weeks from now. I'm going to let this sit for a while. I can still hear that popping and crackling. That's probably going to light up here in a little bit. That was kind of crazy.