Reburn

After a cold and cloudy yesterday I awoke this morning to clear blue skies. Yay! Our overnight low had dropped below freezing so the temperature was still cool, but it looked warm with all the sunshine.

I made the rounds to check how my burnt/burning tree stumps were doing.

South pasture: (7)

• one burnt
• I cut a couple of remaining small roots, and voila, I removed one stump
• 2 were still smoldering intensely. I could see a large hole in the ground where the fire followed a side root
• 3 I gathered wood and burned again
  

I also found the remains of two other small stumps barely poking out of the ground. One was removed easily with a little digging. The other took some time digging then cutting but I also removed that one.

Middle pasture: (17)

• I found the 6 rotted stumps were all smoking holes in the ground
• 2 were burnt
• I reburned 7
• I burnt an additional stump
• I didn't get to the last stump to reburn it before dark

North pasture: (4)

• I didn't get to the 2 that need reburning, nor was I able to check on the one smoldering stump.
• The "spider" stump I cut one "leg" (root) and was able to lift and break it free of the other two "legs". The remains of one "leg" is large enough that I will have to reburn it. Hopefully this will finish it off, but this stump is very hard dense wood and does not burn easily (judging from my four years of burning it).

Of the stumps I reburnt today I feel the burning should finish many of them off this time. (*cross my fingers*). Three, maybe four, stumps may need another burn or two to finish them off. I hope soon as I am getting tired of this.

The day started off with clear skies but by noon clouds rolled in. Then during the day a rolling mix of weather: rain, sun, calm, wind from this then another direction, warm, cold, .... A couple of times I stood under a big pine tree to escape a brief rain shower. The clouds to the SE and NW looked darker blue than the clouds that came overhead.

As I burnt the last cluster of 6 in the middle pasture a front came through and it got very windy. The grass near the stumps was all green or burnt so there was no danger of the the fire getting away. The wind sure fanned the flames. Initially I was dismayed the wind was causing the fire to burn so quick and taking the heat away, but after the front passed and the wind died down, so did the fires. The wind had caused the fires to act as a blowtorch against the tree stumps.

With the nice weather last week the river sure has risen. I can see the difference in the water height over the past two days.

I noticed two of my pocket gopher traps had been sprung. But I never got the time to go back and check my traps for dead gophers or whether the traps were full of dirt.