I had a bonfire this morning. Only the woody material that is too spindly or spiny to use as firewood, and not suitable to go through the shredder to make mulch for the utility area goes on the bonfire. We don't waste anything we can use, but there is always lots that's no good for anything except the bonfire, and the pile of rose prunings, bramble stalks, ivy stems, evening primrose seed heads that I'd meanly declined to leave for the birds because I couldn't face the thought of that many self sown evening primroses, pieces of eleagnus hedge that were too angular to go through the shredder, and other bulky and more or less woody detritus that wasn't fit to compost was getting too big. It loomed over the utility area, making me feel vaguely uneasy, and half filled the garden trailer. I'll want to use that soon, if the weather holds up, to collect even more brambles, plus the juniper by the front door that has massively outgrown its space and is scheduled for the chop.
A well conducted bonfire is good fun. One of the pleasures of living in the countryside is that you are allowed to have one. We try to be considerate neighbours, so definitely no soot on the lettuces, but the field next to us isn't planted up at the moment, and while the promised easterly wind did not materialise, we are far enough away from the next houses that I hoped it wouldn't bother them. Is not the faint whiff of a bonfire one of the classic smells of an English winter? The Systems Administrator is more fastidious about wind direction than that, and will only have one when the wind will blow the smoke into the wood, but I wasn't prepared to wait for the wind to come round.
I wouldn't want to burn that much stuff all at once, having visions of flames shooting eight feet in the air and the hedge catching fire, followed by the SA's workshop. Nowadays I pile the bonfire material along the edge of the wood, so that it can be added to the fire in judicious armfuls. It's better to start from scratch when you're ready to burn anyway, to avoid the risk of incinerating any hedgehogs that mistook the bonfire heap for a cosy spot to hibernate. Though in practice, any hedgehogs that had decided that last time's ash heap was a nice place to sleep would have had quite a long time to escape. I heaped some old cardboard boxes and crumpled newspaper into a little chimney above two firelighters, but the pyre took its time getting going, and I had to go and fetch another firelighter and some more cardboard.
Once the bonfire's in progress it's a question of alternating armfuls of tinder dry dead stems with damper stuff to steer a safe course between the scylla of flames eight feet in the air, and the charybdis of finding that you've put your bonfire out. I'm cautious about adding too much at once and making the fire too large, which is why my bonfires take longer than the SA's. On the other hand, the SA did once set the compost heap on fire, though that was a long time ago. Once the fire has got a really good, hot bed, it's possible to start adding handfuls of long grass. We have a heap of this, raked up after giving the meadow its annual autumn cut. It was not very dry when freshly mown, and it is wetter now, having sat piled next to the SA's greenhouse for a couple of months.
Books on managing meadows, that warn you strictly to remove all mown material to reduce soil fertility, are strangely silent on what you are supposed to do with the cut grass after that. When meadows were genuine hay meadows it wasn't a problem. You made hay, stacked it, and in due course fed it to your stock. But we don't have any stock, apart from the bees and the chickens, and we go for an autumn cut, whereas a hay meadow would be mown in summer when the cut grass had a sporting chance of drying, then grazed for the rest of the season. The grass off the meadow is no good for making compost to go on the borders, because it's full of weed seeds, and there's far too much of it to cart off to the dump. Burning seems the only solution. The SA managed to incinerate some when disposing of the bags and bags of dry eleagnus leaves I raked out of the bottom of the hedge when I cut it back, but by the time we'd run out of leaves we'd still barely made a dent on the grass.
The utility area looked quite spacious and tidy when I'd finished, but there's loads more bonfire stuff to come, including out of the wood where the Essex Wildlife Trust's experimental resumption of coppicing, intended to benefit the wild flowers, seems to have mainly produced brambles. And there's the rest of the rose pruning to do, not to mention the juniper. Plenty of material for at least a couple more bonfires.
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