Satisfying afternoon with fire and chainsaw

A DRY day at this time of the year offers the perfect excuse to start a bonfire. Although frowned upon these days as environmentally unfriendly, there is still a lot to be said for getting a small fire going if you have brushwood and other burnable bits and pieces around the garden that need to be disposed of.

After losing a second tree in as many years to storms my little orchard was in desperate need of a tidy up. Although the bigger branches on the apple and plum trees that came out in successive years will be cut for logs and left to season, there are an awful lot of twiggy bits in a big old fruit tree that need to be disposed of. A professional tree surgeon would usually have a chipper through which the bits and pieces could be fed to make woodchip. When we had a line of leylandii felled a few years back the smaller stuff was put through such a machine and we are still using the huge pile of woodchip today, to refresh paths and other areas.

But with just the top end of the plum tree to deal with hiring in a big piece of machinery seems an unnecessary extravagance, so I set to with matches, a few rolled up balls of newspaper and some dry kindling. Two matches in and we had the start of a roaring fire, helped by a breeze that directed the smoke in the least damaging direction, away from other houses in the village.

I sometimes find with a bonfire that I start by thinking “I wish this was burning a bit more fiercely” and pretty quickly get to the point where I am saying to myself “I wish this wasn’t burning quite so fiercely.”

This time, however, careful control of the fuel meant I kept the fire small and under close control, but still managed to get through a fair bit of waste wood from the tree.

Once it was going I fired up the chainsaw to take the larger pieces and, using a brilliant saw-horse I bought online years ago, created a wheelbarrow full of offcuts that might not look like nice neat split logs, but will burn well in the woodstove. By the time I finished it was getting towards dusk and a slender crescent moon was hanging in the sky over the house. I stuck it out until the last of the embers had died down and the waste wood, plus a pile of old brambles and bracken had burned away to virtually nothing.

There is a certain satisfaction in having spent an afternoon on a mission to tidy things up. A patch on the edge of the garden full of twisted bits of stick and overgrown because it was impossible to mow had a quick ‘scalping’ with the brushcutter before I called it a night and went indoors.