the beauty in a burn pile...

The Oregon Department of Forestry when they "scraped" our property to place the reprod' timber ended the life of not only huge amounts of brush and blackberry, also mowed down ash, oak, apple and various other hard wood trees. All of this "debris" was then mounded into 30' to 50' diameter burn piles. These piles I assume where waiting till fall to be burned and during this time the one close to the house was indiscriminately added to by the previous owners. These additions consisted of old furniture, the odd pillow, discarded toys tires and lots of "scraped" wood.

Brian and I (mostly Brian) in an effort to heat our home have been trekking up the hill and cutting trees out of the piles with a chain saw and hauling in back in a wheel barrow.

Now the hauling back in the wheel barrow is MUCH trickier that one may think. First off the forestry department in addition to giving us this abundant woof/fuel source gave us 1 to 3 foot deep ruts all over our property. Combine these ruts with a full load of logs, Some Oregon mud and 300 yards to travel and you have more fun that a barrel of monkeys...

So I go into the log hauling because Brian fired up his jeep yesterday and to my great pleasure we drove right up to the burn pile loaded the logs and drove home... ! I was so ecstatic I hardly did any work at all as you will note by the multitude of photos....

This brings me to part two of my Burn Pile saga... we set out to make two additions to our farm this past week .. and both I am quite pleased to report are from 100% salvaged materials from here on the farm... (ok except the hardware cloth for the bottom of the chicken coop) We used an old screen door from the barn, one of the old windows from the house and lots of salvaged lumber from the burn piles and of course Brian made it all possible... It was so much fun to work with Brian... he's quite clever that guy of mine... The first item was a cold frame that Brian built while I was back east ...and that we planted with our winter greens yesterday... and the second addition was the chicken coop which we built together in anticipation of our new chickens due to arrive Monday morning. I learned how to use a pocket joiner. This handy tool is especially useful when screwing into wood that is less than perfect...such as burn pile wood. So it was a full farm weekend of building things, splitting wood, moving chief's pasture again and planting seeds...

I love the spoon handle B' made on the cold frame : )

Speeking of cold.. we have been geeting some very nice warm clear weather ... and as a result I am also very please to report our house is 73 degrees tonight it's down right hot in here!!! It's very nice after weeks of running between 45 and 60 at it's warmest!!! I can take off my wool sweater and hat tonight!!