When Jerry came home, he had to take a picture of me raking to show our friends that I actually do grunt labor around the house sometimes.
I raked for an hour until I had a blister on my soft girly hand. Hey, don't laugh. It's hard to rake up 8-inch long Ponderosa Pine needles that are stuck on wet grass and soil!I'm holding a 30-gallon trash bag, which, I might add, I filled up four times in that hour and carried down the hill to the burn pile.
Jerry took these shots from up on our top deck (veranda)....You can see that we live on quite a steep slope.
Here are the four 30-gallon trash bags worth of pine needles. OK, it doesn't look like a lot, but it seemed like a lot to me.
You can see the residual ashes left from Jerry's second and most recent burn of the season. It's all good, because it's all for the sake of fire safety. Burn permits are suspended by June due to all the dry brush, so we burn unwanted branches, pine needles and brush as much as we can while burning is permitted. You have to call the El Dorado County Burn Day Information Line to hear if it's a burn day, even in the winter.The counties in the mountains and foothills are probably the only ones in CA that allow burning because of the forest fire danger we have here. It's kind of fun to have a periodic bonfire on your own property. Smokey Bear would be proud of us.
BTW, Smokey Bear no longer goes by Smokey the Bear. Here's the chorus of his song which I first heard when I was a little girl in the 1950s:
Smokey the Bear, Smokey the Bear.
Prowlin' and a growlin' and a sniffin' the air.
He can find a fire before it starts to flame.
That's why they call him Smokey,
That was how he got his name.
I think Smokey is still promoting fire prevention today, fifty-some years later, and we do our part in preventing forest fires.
3 comments:
Wow that's a lot of raking to do! We can't burn here, although VERY close to me, people can. I love the smell of it.
Do any people compost some of the tree leavings, or is there just too much to even try?
Michelle: It's too much to even try. PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) hires a tree-trimming company every year to cut down branches hanging over power lines and they put the branches through a wood chipper. They give loads of wood chips to our neighbor in exchange for letting them park their trucks on our neighbors' property. She uses them for mulch and generously lets us use them for mulch in our garden, too.
Pine needles are too acidic for compost...burns plants.
So......is Smokey the Bear's middle name "the?"
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