Slash pile burning

[nm9stheham]

Once out of the ground, grinding becomes kinda tough, unless you have something to hold them still while the grinder gnaws at them. Bury is what I would do.... and then expect a bit of a swale to develop some decades down the road. Maybe just cover them where they are? Where did the dirt go? (When we built out house, hauling off the stumps was part of the excavator's scope of work.)

Or do like the videos and get some scrap wood and build a tight, slow burning fire around each stump. The idea is to restrict the oxygen going in, so as to turn as much of the extra wood as possible into charcoal, which has the heat to reduce the stump. Or maybe buy a bunch of charcoal and use the pit???

[oregonwoodsmoke]

All the trees taken down at our place end up as fire wood. The chain saw and log splitter whip them into shape.


Either for the wood stove or the fire pit. The long skinny branches get cut into longer lengths to take camping for the camp fire there. Smaller diameter sticks burn fast, so the fire can be done and out and we can go to bed without leaving any hot coals in the fire pit.


Some of the really skinny branches with a lot of leaves and needles get arranged into quail shelter. The quail will move into a brush pile if they like the location and if the family dogs don't harass them too often.

[Curly Q. Bobalink]

As an outsider, I would think the preferable solution would be to somehow chip, season, and then "pelletize" the residual, to provide fuel for intentional warmth in winter months. Burning in the summer provides no utility for the heat from the fire, and the more it's done, the greater the chance of someone not knowing what they're doing burning down the rest of the forest. As others have said, it's going back to CO2 anyway (through decay), so we may as well get some use out of it, maybe it would substitute for fossil fuel (gas or electric) use over the winter months. I would think a lot of Preppers would love to have plastic barrels of emergency winter fuel available (using all that waste plastic in the ocean for the "barrels".

I'd be surprised if no one has invented a very small "combine", maybe the size of a large skid steer, that could be driven into tight spaces, to harvest and process what is effectively the forest's "scat". I've looked out onto miles of sagebrush and thought the same thing, "You'd think there'd be a way to harvest all that into some useful product". Color me 1870's Mormon, I guess.

[nm9stheham]

RE the above: Looked it up and there are indeed small pellet mills. Looks like the wood needs to be chipped, dried, rocks and dirt removed, and then put into a pellet mill, preferably with a binder. Then bagged and burned in a stove for pellets. So a non-trivial amount of time and equipment is needed; it seems like pelletizing depends on some scale to be viable for the money and effort. And it does not solve the problems of stumps.

[Exwyocowboy]

Originally Posted by Boone1791

Tis the season for slash pile burning. Obviously this is a good thing -- clearing out the forest floor and burning it under controlled conditions rather than leaving the potential for it burning under uncontrolled conditions.

I don't know what the solution is. It's just so inexpensive and effective to do it the way it's always been done. Here we have tons and tons of "fuel" that could potentially be used productively (and "scrubbed" to reduce harmful emissions), but clearly there's no way to move that fuel to a place where such productive use could be made. And to keep the carbon sequestered, burying a huge slash pile is not really a reasonable option, considering the comparative cost of just burning it.

We never had enough scraps left around after a major cut, but if we did - a wood chipper and visqueen bags helped a lot. We'd bag up the chips and sell them at the home improvement shows. Cedar and Spruce mostly. It makes no sense to fill the skies with black smoke - you're really burning money.

[Clark Fork Fantast]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Since our biggest problem is the stumps, I think we're going to remove all branches from the pit and use them for kindling/firewood, and bury the stumps in the pit. Where did the dirt go? Good question! It was piled up as a berm around the pit to contain the fire, I guess. We'll do SSS next year--slash, shovel, and stop worrying about the pile!

[banjomike]

Originally Posted by nm9stheham

RE the above: Looked it up and there are indeed small pellet mills. Looks like the wood needs to be chipped, dried, rocks and dirt removed, and then put into a pellet mill, preferably with a binder. Then bagged and burned in a stove for pellets. So a non-trivial amount of time and equipment is needed; it seems like pelletizing depends on some scale to be viable for the money and effort. And it does not solve the problems of stumps.

The amount of processing it takes to make wood pellets made the pellet stoves unappealing to me.
The pellets have some advantages; they store very well and economically, and they're a lot cleaner and more pest-free than cord wood, but they don't put out any more heat, and that, to me, is the payoff for any furnace or heating stove.

Back when I was a kid, we would always augment our wood burning with some soft coal. The coal was purchased in 50 lb. gunny sacks, and all the wood stoves had to have fire brick floors in them or had to be made of cast iron to use the coal, but the heat the coal put off made for a lot of comfort when the weather took a deep sub-zero dive.

Tossing in a few big chunks of coal into the wood fire often was good for a better night's sleep in the deep cold. Coal burned hotter and longer than all the soft cord wood we cut, so the house wouldn't become as chilly in the early pre-dawn hours when the coal was added to the fire.

Coal left clinkers that had to be shoveled out of the stove, but they were good for spreading on icy walkways to provide traction once they were broken up.
The coal stored as well as the pellets store. While it wasn't really clean, it wasn't much dirtier than the cord wood- just a different kind of mess.

The coal wasn't much more expensive than the wood, even when the wood was free. Our firewood was like all the other here; wood that needed to be managed. Heating fuel was only one of several uses for it.

[snowave]

it sucks for air quality, but as has been said... probably better than nothing. I just hate it when they burn during an inversion, like they did a couple weeks ago in the Meadows Valley near McCall. That really sucked for about 10 days. thankfully, the Wilks Bros land where they were burning, seems to have mostly stopped for now.

[Cnynrat]

Originally Posted by nm9stheham

Stumps typically don't burn much at all on their own; the only way is to generate a hot charcoal fire and slowly reduce them. Grinding and burying are the only fast solutions.

You can find some good YouTube videos of reducing stumps by burning; it ain't easy. Or, maybe you can find someone with an erosion problem and haul the stumps there for dumping to help stop the erosion.

Very true. I've found that it takes me twice to burn even a small stump. In the first burn pile the smaller roots burn, but the main part of the stump just becomes charred. If I put that charred stump, and I think now dried out stump, on a second burn pile it will usually burn the second time, but that does take some management of the pile to make sure the stump stays in the hottest part of the fire.

I've given up on burning stumps. I now use my tractor carry stumps to an out of the way part of our property where I've started a "stump pile."

Originally Posted by Clark Fork Fantast

Thanks for the advice! Our tree guy should have known that. I think what we may have to do next summer is grind up and bury. At least the stumps are in a pit already!

My observation is that loggers are famous for lighting a pile and walking away. The result is always that there is a lot of partially and even unburned material left after the fire. Frankly, it leaves a real mess. For my slash piles, which admittedly are much smaller, I manage them as they burn by pushing unburned material into the center of the fire. By doing that I am able to get 100% burning, except for stumps as I mentioned above.

Dave

[TrixieDouble]

When I burn my slash pile I invite my friends so we can all enjoy the heat, have a toddy, and watch the river go by. I have to burn in the winter so I don't start a wild fire!