burning issues

Longtime readers of Ocean will remember various ideas I threw out as to what Ed and I would like to see for the acre of land at the farmette that lies behind the barn. We have talked about chickens roaming the land. Just a few. Pretty ones. Or goats. More recently – bee hives, maintained by serious bee keepers (not us). Tentatively – grape vines. Or give it over to forestland. Meaning – create a forest.

None of these ideas moved beyond the speculative phase.

But now, suddenly, we moved forward. And you could say today we really moved forward.

A not too distant neighbor who has big time farming machinery came by to assess the tilling possibility.






And, after receiving permission from the fire department to burn the chopped down honeysuckle branches scattered over the land, we set fire to them. Or rather Ed set fire to them.






He did the burning. Monday is a heavy teaching day for me and all I could offer was a quick early guarding of the blaze as he fetched extra buckets of water to contain the fire, should it spread. It really was a windy day.


A bright and beautiful windy day. A day when the blooms on the farmette were at their peak.






In the evening, I returned just as Ed was kicking the final branches into the dying fire.






What next? I’ll keep you posted. For now, I need to return to my work.