I got rid of only 1 this year (1/27/24) but it was the biggest pile I have ever burned.




Now we lost our snow & are in high fire danger: crazy for February. If we get more snow, I'm leary of ~spring brush pile burning because I've heard stories of piles remaining hot well after the landowner thinks they are out

Tried several times to burn a pile this winter with the drifting it was a no go I have several rotted RR ties that should get it going.

I made up some pre-packaged kindling boxes. Works great. 1 can slide into a pile to get it going. I use newspaper & kindling chards leftover from firewood splitting.

Dry hay bales and feed sacks are a great way to start a brush pile. The largest pile I ever burned was about 60' in diameter and 12' high.

A guy I know used to have a Christmas tree bonfire party every year. He with the help of many other people collected many hundred of Christmas trees after Christmas. He used a crane to pile them high. When lit, the flames went very high into the sky. The heat was so intense, we had to move hundreds of feet back. In about 6 minutes, there would only be a few scattered fires, where the immense pile of Christmas trees was. The fire was always lit in creative ways, such as by flaming arrows, lines of kerosene and zigzag lines of black powder.

Keith

I never burn brush piles, always leave them for the rabbits.

me too...i even build them on purpose and I have rabbits! I set aside about 4 acres and built about 15 piles in 2 acres of it and I let pasture grow tall and keep salt out.

Good habitat for all kinds of critters.

I have burned a few

Good wet morning and a weed burner to get it fired up.
Bigger ones usually involve a few gallons of diesel

I have an attachment for the tractor that looks like a giant garden rake. Once they burn down I keep pushing everything in to the center until there is nothing but ash left

Biggest one took several days to get burned up

I make brush piles not burn them.

burnt 7-8 piles this weekend. Really liked using a blower to blow the leaf litter into the pile and give me a fire line around the piles. Also the blower really shines when the fire is dwindling down. You can blow the stuff around and give it more oxygen to stimulate the fire again to finish burning down

I have 5 piles on an acre lot that need the flame. Unfortunately I need snow first !

I burn slash about every year. This year has been a lot tricker because lack of snow. I did manage to compete all the burning this year after a few snowfalls. As far as keeping for rabbits there is more than enough cover (heavy) for wildlife to live here.

You can do both with the lake flooding several years ago it killed a lot of our trees around the house and washed away a lot of the shoreline that’s now a 3-5 foot drop off now. That low spot grows some great cover thick and tall out of sight from others that might find ways to complain about anything. I have a large civet area I made to protect them with continuous cover allowing them to live safely undisturbed. Between old building materials and several loads of fireweed surrounded by tall weeds is perfect for them.

Also put a food plot in that flat fertile area that gets a lot of visitors day and night. The flooding took down a lot of trees by eroding the soil around the roots so those trees get cleaned up for boiler wood and the stumps are covered with loose bark and branches for brush piles. Every place I cut trees at gets brush piles it’s just a better look when you’re done cutting a place the landowners can decide what to do with the piles after that.

My woods is severely over crowded like most woodlots.
As I partially thin the woods I make brush piles. I'll cut some of the real small trees (mostly Sugar Maple and Ironwood) brush them out, kill and leave standing large poor firewood trees like aspen and red maple. The already dead Ash get left standing too.
I'm keeping and encouraging white and red oak, shagbark hickory, cherry and a very few of other species.
I burn the piles as I'm prepping the ground ( combination of leaf blowing and raking) for seeding of grasses and forbs.
After burning and seeding in late fall I'll cut the remaining trees I want to thin and toss the tops around to eventually rot away.
Smaller trees I'll drop and leave, larger ones that are good firewood get removed.
whats left is a much more open woodlot with very little brush or small trees and some soon to rot away tree tops scattered around along with some small tree trunks.
After 2-3 years the ground is now covered with grasses and forbs, more sunlight hits the ground and there is much more life in the open woods vs the previous dark and dead ground.

There are areas that I have not treated yet, these will have brush piles that remain til I get to those areas. I treat about 1 1/4-2 acres/yr.

What I don't fir in the wood chipper, I push together in a couple of different places on the property and leave it for the critters to hide in and add more to those piles throughout the year.

I agree. No reason to burn them if you can push them into an out of the way spot. True stewards of the land would leave them.

I leave them all for wildlife

After the loggers leave we’ll pile everything into really decent piles and light them during burn season. Some of those piles have burned for WEEKS!!
Down here we have controlled burns every year, hence burn season.

Every fall I pile trimmings up towards the corner of my property, as do several neighbors. I call it my "wild area".

It sure helps the rabbits avoid cats and hawks.

I used to pile brush up for rabbits. Now, I've got so many rabbits, they ruin my garden.