Brush pile

Winter hasn’t arrived yet, and of course I’m thinking of spring. I had to take the little garden tiller to the shop — I’d pulled out the starter cord — and when I got it back I ran it across  the vegetable garden five times. The soil is dense, so I only got down about 3 inches. 

I till to get rid of the weeds and surface clutter so I could stack the brush pile.

I didn’t need a brush pile last year, but since early this past summer, I’ve accumulated a respectable mound. Our home is on a quarter-acre in-town lot. There’s no place to strew the brush to let it deteriorate naturally. So I burn it.

In Massachusetts, we have a three-month or so burning season in the spring.

I have to center the brush pile in the garden spot. For one thing, burning regulations stipulate how far a brush pile needs to be from a property boundary when burning. 

More critical, however, is I have to position the brush so it is not close to the plastic containers that Donna uses to contain her various herbs. Last time I burned, the flames licked too close to a couple of those plastic buckets, creating some very modern art that was totally useless for gardening.

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The first layer of brush was relatively neat and flat. But as I went on, adding more recent (and gangly) tree trimmings, it got totally out of hand. Some branches from the red oak still have their leaves. Some apple tree branches refused to take a flat shape unless rendered in 12-inch sections.

There are three white birches on our property, a Colorado blue spruce, a musclewood, two small white pines, a red oak and a redbud, both extremely one-sided as they reside beneath the two white ash and two Norway maples. I’d like to get rid of those maples, but they are too large to cut with my bucksaw. I don’t have a chainsaw.

Some of these species were put in as seedlings when one or the other of the daughters was in Girl Scouts.

The two self-seeded butternuts are still small. I don’t like where they are growing, next to the chicken shed. But they can keep growing, for now.

Lastly we have a crab apple tree, a lilac, a sugar maple and a Liberty apple.

Anyway,  lots of brush this year. 

The birds, particularly the Carolina wrens and nuthatchers, love to hide in the brush during winter, so they can watch for a good turn at the bird feeder. Some snowy days there won’t be a bird in sight from our window, but they are obviously there. We can hear them chirping to each other. A brush pile music box.

With brush sculpture complete, the next task is to rebuild the bird feeder. A bear rudely bashed the old one to pieces during a nighttime visit in April.

The writer is an associate editor of this newspaper.