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Slash Burn 2010 -- 25 February 2010 -- If you've never set fire to a pile of dry branches the size of a large car, I recommend it. This is the scariest picture I took, and it still doesn't look like much, and it's nothing compared to a forest fire, but even a fire this size is scary! It's surprisingly loud, hot, and violent. This is mostly the limbs of the two western hemlocks that fell a couple years ago. You can see the pile on the right side of this photo from last June. I covered it with a tarp over the winter to keep it dry, and stuck in a barrel that needed to be burned clean. Two days ago I drove up early, walked in the last mile, and lit it up with a rag soaked in alcohol. That fire went out! So I lit another fire, and then another. You really have to build a small campfire inside the pile. But then at a certain point, it takes off fast.

If you're doing this in cold, damp weather, as you should, the wood at the edges of the pile will not burn. Maybe 20 minutes after the above photo, you can see here that the fire has gone down and has just eaten out the center of the pile. About ten minutes after this, it finally cooled down enough that I could get close enough to throw most of the edge wood into the center with a shovel. In this photo and the above, you can see a five gallon bucket full of water, one of three that I set around the perimeter in case the fire spread, which turned out to be completely unnecessary this early in the year.

When all the wood was burned, turned to charcoal, or on fire, I got the idea to bury what was left so that more of it would turn into charcoal instead of burning. So I just went around the edges with a shovel and threw all the coals and the dirt under them into a pile in the center. I figure I'll pick out all the charcoal and store it for terra preta, and use this same spot every year for slash burning. Between that and the five or six piles that I've covered with leaves to speed decomposition, I think I'm gradually gaining on the dead wood.


The Year Without a Winter -- 6 February 2010 -- In December of 2008, Spokane got more than five feet of snow. This year I don't think we got five inches. We're usually buried in snow for all of January, and this year the streets are dry and I've been riding my bike in the sun, sometimes barefoot.

The good news is, I might be able to start working on my land a couple months early. I'll drive up in a few days and see if I can get in, and if so, I can do some work and hauling. [Update: still too muddy for 2wd, although it should be easily drivable in April.]

The bad news is, unless we get an unusually rainy summer, eastern Washington will have the worst drought in the USA, there will be huge fires, and the spring might go dry. It has run through some very dry summers, but has not yet been tested after a dry winter. I'll have to get some food grade 50 gallon barrels and spend a day filling them.


Perennial Root Vegetables -- 22 January 2010 -- When I was in Portland, I was invited to an exotic perennial root vegetable tasting, including scorzonera, skirret, oca, jerusalem artichoke, dahlia, yacon, daylily, mashua, and wapato. To me, the wapato tasted like dirty socks, but I loved the raw mashua, because of its spiciness, and the yacon, which is sweet and crunchy like an apple. Neither of those grow in my climate, but my other two favorites do: Jerusalem artichokes, aka sunchokes, are not great, but good enough that everyone should grow them because they're so easy and productive. And the big winner was skirret. The root looks like a bunch of pencil-thin white carrots, and tastes like a carrot but sweeter, and when it's cooked it gets soft like a potato. Eric Toensmeier's Perennial Vegetables says that you should not buy seeds, but find living plants of a variety that does not have a woody center, and one source is Perennial Pleasures.

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