Burning the prairie

Saturday was an almost perfect day to burn a prairie if you didn't mind that the wind was 15-20, Ordinarily we would have scrubbed the burn in that wind, but the humidity was rather high and we waited until late in the day when the humidity would be rising, and we hoped the wind might drop. Plus the burn we had in mind was well contained - the steep, south-facing hillside on the north side of our pasture.

This prairie is virginal, but not pure, so to speak. It's a much-degraded community of four or five grasses - little bluestem, big bluestem, side oats gramma, indian grass and a couple of smaller varieties, plus a very limited number of forbs. It's too steep and rocky to pasture, so I can only think it has just been neglect that has reduced it to such a paltry number of species, interspersed with the usual invaders - prickly ash, Japanese honeysuckle, black cherry, red cedar and some escaped pasture grasses.

Almost perfect until we loaded the truck with all the burn equipage and tried to drive out to the burn site. I should have known when I skidded through the first gate with mud flying that this was a bad idea; by the time we approached the second gate, the truck was axle deep and going nowhere. We had moved about 25 yards. I wasn't looking forward to humping the water packs and 40 gallons of extra water all the way to the other side of the pasture, so I got the little tractor out and tried to pull the truck out. Nothing. 8 wheels spinning. Finally I went around and pulled from the front. Somehow it started moving and with Bruce spitting mud 20 feet high from all four wheels, we skidded the truck through the mud and into the waterlogged pasture. If his friends at the Sierra Club could see him now! Good thing I had just washed the truck.

That's what we should expect I suppose when we still have glaciers six inches deep along the north-facing hillsides slowly releasing their gallons of meltwater into the low part of the pasture. It's 600 feel of squish. I've burned prairie when it has been below freezing (Don't do it; the water freezes in your nozzles) and in a snowstorm, but never with snowbanks still on the ground. But this was the year of 102 inches of snow, so of course it wasn't gone by April.

Once we made it to the site the burn went off without a hitch, even burning through the woods where we cleared two years ago in hopes of coaxing the savannah back into bloom. That's the same area where the fire got into a hollow oak about three or four years ago and Dan and I had to cut it down while burning embers rained down on us from above. Now it's pretty clear of those dangers. So far it's blooming in prickly ash and black cherry, but they're both pretty vulnerable to fire, so maybe this will help. Last year we couldn't burn - a big disappointment - because the weather was always too wet or too windy. This year we lucked out.

In any case, there's nothing like the smell of a prairie fire to make you thrill to the elemental joy of the primordial land. This land has been on fire for thousands of years since the big glaciers left and Saturday we once again reenacted a spiritual rite that's older than any religion.

If you're wondering, we just left the truck in the pasture. That's a story for the next post - the fire horse.