Prairie Fire

A large portion of our land is enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) which keeps highly erodible land out of production agriculture and yet preserves the land.  We are obligated to keep our land as tall grass prairie, which is what it used to be centuries ago.

Prairie used to burn every now and then, which maintains the grass and gets rid of the shrubs and trees and other weedy invaders.  These days burning is a management practice but like most managed things, it gets complicated.  Because of the CRP we cannot burn from April 15th to July 15th.  Most of the grass would benefit from a late April, early May burn, but rules are rules.

Foreground is pasture, which didn't burn much, background is prairie, which did burn.

A good burn

Get the dogs to swim AFTER they walked on the ashes!

So we burned in early April, and thanks to our neighbors' help, we did get a very good burn in.  A good burn is one where the house and barns are intact afterwards, the tall grass is gone and burned to ashes, and no neighbor got burned out.
We didn't even have smoke on the highway, and the only time law enforcement came by it was to compliment us, because there were many other burns that had gotten away from the controlled category, and firefighters were out in force.  Part of the blame for that is with the weather forecast, which is as good as studying entrails, if you ask me, but since the weather including wind speed and direction is forecast hourly for the coming days, people tend to believe that sort of prediction and use it to plan their burns.
We have done so in the past.
However, we were ready a bit before our scheduled start time, and so we decided to 'get her done', which turned out to be a stroke of genius (dumb luck, really).  We were done before the winds picked up to twice or three times the predicted speeds (not to mention that the directions were wrong, too), and since we burned there has been no let up in wind, only it keeps getting colder and shifting.

We got good back fires in, had enough time to get back to the house, where Harold and I had mowed previously, and not even a hay bale got singed.  We were both rather sooty at the end of the day, but it washed out, and the dogs were rather snooty, since they had been locked up, but that was better after they all got cookies.

Where is the birdie?

Decibel helped with the clean up, she bites the water from the hose, and then tried to lick the camera.  Maggie tries to camouflage herself by becoming one with the soot, and suffers from excessive bathing.  She does not like it one bit.  Ralph just wants to sit in the truck, and Skeeter has no clue.

I know where to go to get black paws!