Burning pasture

Wow.  Sunday was nice.  No snow.  No rain.  No clouds.  Temperature in the 50s.  You'd think Spring is coming.

I planned on dragging my harrow around the hayfield but I got distracted by fire.  In the NE pasture I had a few patches of tall grass that I didn't mow and I got the idea of trying to burn them to "clean them up".  The burning went better than I expected as I thought it might have been too wet and cool to burn well. It wasn't and the grass definitely was dry.  The green grass hasn't really started growing yet so that didn't get in the way of burning.  And there was a light breeze to encourage the fire.

So I burned more of the NE pasture than I planned.  I would have liked to have burnt all the remaining tall grass in the NE pasture but the part I didn't burn went all the way up to the neighbor's yard and due to the general wind direction I decide to err on the side of being too cautious and plan to burn this area another day.

Instead I burned the tall grass along the south corral fence to clean this area up.

Then it was on to tall grass in the north pasture. By the time the horses were pastured in the north pasture last year some parts of it started to dry up so the horses preferred to eat elsewhere in the north pasture.

I burned the area between the wheel tracks to create a fire break.  Then when I was ready to burn the first large area I asked Tammy to come help me.  I felt more comfortable having a second person help keep a eye on the area being burnt.   However by the Tammy got dressed and came out to help me I had the first section burnt already.

I was working on burning more between the wheel tracks to prepare a fire break for the rest of the burning.  The grass was taller in this section and in several places the breeze came up and the fire jumped the wheel track into tall grass on the other side and began to spread.

Uh oh.

While the fire would have lost fuel and died out once it reached the neighbor's mowed yard I don't like losing control of the fire.  This section was large and there was always a chance of something unpredictable happening. For example the wind could suddenly increase or change direction.  I furiously worked at putting out the fire.  The grass was so dry that embers would start spot fires that quickly grew.  To my advantage was when the variable wind would die down.  Up down.  Up down.  When the wind died down I gained on the fire only to lose my gain when the wind kicked back up.  Finally I got the fire out north of the wheel track.  The fire on the south side was easier to put out.

Once I got the extra fires out... then Tammy showed up to help.  She had been working on future women's expos and wasn't happy I drug her outside to help me.  She hadn't seen how the fire almost go away from so she felt I could handle the fire without her help.

My enthusiastic helper.

Once we burnt the wheel track all the way to the river I had a fire break splitting the north pasture in two.

The light breeze was now from the north so I was able to work on burning the tall grass north of the fire break.  Part of this area had large dead spotted knapweed weeds I had sprayed herbicide on last year and killed.  It was ugly and some weeds had seeds on them.  It was best to burn them up.

I was able burn the majority of these weeds before the wind died and the sun set.  Once that happened the energy for burning disappeared and the grass and weeds didn't want to burn without a lot of encouragement.  So we called it a day. I plan on finish burning this area and a few others another day.

The taller black dead stuff is knapweed plants.

The first large section I had burned.  Before and after.

What I burned in the north pasture.