What were we thinking???

I can’t count the number of times we have done things where we later ask ourselves, “What were we thinking???” Five years ago we had our neighbor, who saws wood for a living, pile slabs of wood in a field of ours in vegetable production but where we had a terrible time dealing with fescue overtaking our crops. Our reasoning for piling this wood, was that we would burn it, expecting the heat from the fire to kill the fescue roots and the wood ashes adding potassium to the soil, with finally the farmers and the field co-existing forever in happiness. Just this past week burning this wood made the top of our priority list and I am wondering why it never made the list before now? We began by cutting quite a bit of the slabs from these woodpiles into pieces sized to fit in the wood boiler then stacked the wood in our wood shed. We did this for 3 days and I think both Carl and I had enough of cutting and stacking the wood so we began burning the piles. Alivn came over with his track-hoe and merged all six of the woodpiles into one enormous pile that we are trying to burn. I still believe the pigs do a better job rooting up fescue than fire burning the fescue. So thanks to Peter, Paul and Mary for rooting up the perennial berry and fruit tree portion of our fields!

NEVER again will we have our neighbor dump slabs in our field. Although since that time, his slabs have become a commodity so he wouldn’t dump them, with many folks in our community heating their homes with the slabs of wood.