An Invaluable Tool
Winter is here in the WNC (Western North Carolina) and there are STILL more leaves to be dealt with. It’s been very wet and cold here for the better part of November (2022) which makes moving and burning leaves a more difficult task.
About a week before Thanksgiving I noticed the heaviest leaf drops had finished and the ground had collected most of what it was going to for the season. I needed to use the old-fashioned broom (egad!) to move around a lot of the wet leaves because while leaf blowers are a great tool, they don’t do very well with heavy, wet, and sticky things.
Relatively speaking, this was by far not my most enormous pile of leaves, but time was running out with the weather plus I had collected lots of old fenceposts and tree limbs that had fallen since my last cleanup. We are about to embark on heavier-duty burning than just leaves.
There has been an old outhouse on top of the driveway since we moved in and we recently discovered it wasn’t something to hold on to (yes, I hoard sometimes!) or really worth anything other than an eyesore. Stacy has been asking me to deal with it for a while, so today was the day I tore it down and burned the evidence! Here is a closer look at the scene before I got started:
You can’t see it in the photo above, but there are about 20 logs, posts, and random pieces of wood piled up behind the outhouse. And for good measure, I also pulled apart and burned the wooden planter box you see to the right of the outhouse. It was great for our small porch in Chicago but it has seen better days since spending the past few years out in the woods. (The hoarder in me struggled with this for HOURS.)
I shot several hours of video and have arranged some clips showcasing the burn cage in action. This is something better shown than written about so I’ll keep it short here…
Video
Assembling the cage – I haven’t shown this before and wanted to share it with anyone curious about how easy it is for one person. It took me a total of 4 minutes and 35 seconds from start to finish.
Time-lapse burn – One of our most popular requests, here is a time-lapse video of about two-hours worth of leaves and wood, added over the course of time.
Greatest flames compilation – Glorious wood-burning flame 🔥
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