It’s a rare treat, but you can’t beat a bonfire

IT may be frowned on by the clean air campaigners and those worried about particulates and carbon emissions, but in the right circumstances there are few more satisfying garden jobs than a nice big bonfire.

Those still cold days of last week provided the perfect opportunity to put a match to a lot of the garden waste and orchard trimmings – and I am glad to say I took it.

Starting and managing a fire is a skill that every boy and girl should learn. Three things, fuel, oxygen and a heat source, are all that’s needed.

But in dull and damp England it can sometimes be infuriatingly hard to imagine how forest fires ever get out of control... Just getting the blooming thing started can be a trial.

The trick for me is to take a few dry sticks of kindling from the fireplace indoors, along with some sheets of newspaper, to start things off. Feed it with the tiniest and driest twigs from the garden – then watch it all like a hawk for the first ten minutes or so, until the heat has built up sufficiently to allow larger branchesto go on.

With almost no wind the smoke rose in a column straight up and I soon had a crackling blaze. Adding the wood from a fallen apple tree too small to be worth keeping for the woodstove had the bonfire blazing away for almost the whole day.

At one point the column of hot air was so strong a buzzard drifted over and I swear it begun circling higher and higher, using the heat as thermal uplift. At least, that’s how it looked from the ground.

Bonfires can be pretty anti-social so this one was set up well away from other properties and I kept it small. The temptation can be to add more and more fuel which either swamps the flames and puts them out or starts a conflagration if can be hard to control. You need to watch a fire closely – and have a water source handy in case things get out of control.

But the satisfaction of turning a pile of twigs and small branches into a modest mound of ash makes the time and effort worthwhile. In the past I have used a chipper to turn offcuts from a tree-felling operation into wood chip for paths and borders, but I now have a pile of chippings that will take a lifetime to use up. The fire seemed like the best bet and meant I could also burn up dead brambles, bracken and other bits of dead and dried vegetation from around the edge of the garden.

For a happy few hours, I kept my fire fuelled and stayed warm on one of the coldest days of the year. At the end of the day, as the dusk fell, I raked out the ashes until the glow of the last embers had faded and there was no risk of the fire flaring up again. Job done.