Winter Fun of Burning Brush

After a storm everyone rushes out to the beach to check the waves.
One thing about the winter storms - the wind blows lots of dead limbs down.  Which means brush clean-up!  My sister and I love to burn brush and my Dad's yard is perfect for when we are bored and looking for a little something to do.  Two weeks ago recorded wind gusts were 80 mph so you can imagine that we had some brush down.  The dogs Sadie and Sophie are always up for an adventure too.

This is a favorite brush burning bin, but as you can see - it was full of ice water.  Hummm.  Dad's yard is full of everything you can imagine so a little poking around and we have a barrel with a hole in the bottom.  We got the brush burning pretty good in that barrel but it would smolder so then we took a huge stick and propped it up on some rocks - that hole in the bottom came in handy and kept the fire burning very hot.  We burned lots of brush - lots!

Can you see Dad's tire collection over to the right?  Every so often my brother hires someone to come take them all to the dump - this is expensive because you have to pay per tire, but Dad goes right back to collecting them.  Well you never know when a tire will come in handy like when you want to build a trailer or something.

Here is the picnic table.  Dad's treasures.  About every 10 years or so my brother has a scrap metal person come and we pile all the old cars and trucks and misc. stuff up and he takes them away.  I have photos of piles of stuff way up over my head from one year.  It makes a clean slate for Dad to start all over again.  See that train track - it is from Dad's 2' guage train.  He gave 2 engines and lots of cars and tracks to a museum, but he still has some of the stuff.  My nephew cleared off some of the track and set up a comfy chair that he found in the shop on one of the cars.  When I was a kid Dad would run the train up and down a long track.  One of those engines was so loud it would shake the entire neighborhood!

And when we were all done burning, look what I found to put smoother our fire.  Perfect.

Dad's yard is actually very beautiful in the summer when it is all filled in with greenery and singing birds.  All my life we have had fun "playing" in the yard and we are still at it.