Bonfire

One use for all those dead trees.

We have a small forest at our summer place, but trees die, during droughts, during winter storms, and just because.

So we cut those dead ones down and use all the good ones for firewood. The sauna has a wood stove, and we have a fireplace in the main house too. Watching the flames dance behind the glass and getting warm while a cold wind is howling around the house is just lovely, in autumn.

But there's a lot of more or less rotten wood, too, in those old trees, and those end up in bonfires. We've had two of those this year, cos 1) the wind has to be right, and 2) the water has to be low, and 3) it has to have rained, to stop the trees behind our bonfireplace from catching fire.

Pic: 17:33: We've just set fire to a bonfire. It's rather larger than you'd think: that's an adult adjusting something in the burning stack.

Pic: 17:38: The fire is going full-strength just 5 minutes later. It smokes a lot, as we just had about 7 mm of rain and the logs were damp.

We sat watching the fire until 22:00 or so; by then only a few large logs were burning. Scattering them stopped them burning, so we left the fire to ember along.

I love bonfires on the water.

This one was hot enough to melt aluminium (660 C). I know, cos I had a bit of scrap metal which I threw in the middle of things when things were at their hottest. I got some nicely weird runny aluminium from the more or less cold remains of the fire in the morning.