Longleaf
Member
Seemed kinda ironic that just as the governor made his declaration the humidity dropped and those dreaded gusty winds from the east showed up, but low humidity and a stiff east wind is what we really needed to get a decent burn on a couple blocks.
In this block we have been trying to thin out some volunteer loblolly that you can see is getting fairly tall in places. We burned it last year and got about 30% of the volunteer pine. Saturday I lit a backing fire along the break on the downwind side to establish my baseline. I then ran wider and wider strips of head fire parallel to the baseline to get a wider area of black to increase the width of my control line. With about 100 yards of black in addition to the plowed break to stop the fire, I went around to the front and dropped a line of head fire that ran with the wind. When I say ran...I do mean ran! It took about an hour to get the first 1/3 of the block burned and less than 10 minutes to get the remaining 2/3!
The plan here was to use the windy conditions to help move the heat out of the canopies of the big pines, yet put a good bit of heat over the top of the shorter volunteers. In a week or so we'll know for sure how well it worked.
In this block we have been trying to thin out some volunteer loblolly that you can see is getting fairly tall in places. We burned it last year and got about 30% of the volunteer pine. Saturday I lit a backing fire along the break on the downwind side to establish my baseline. I then ran wider and wider strips of head fire parallel to the baseline to get a wider area of black to increase the width of my control line. With about 100 yards of black in addition to the plowed break to stop the fire, I went around to the front and dropped a line of head fire that ran with the wind. When I say ran...I do mean ran! It took about an hour to get the first 1/3 of the block burned and less than 10 minutes to get the remaining 2/3!
The plan here was to use the windy conditions to help move the heat out of the canopies of the big pines, yet put a good bit of heat over the top of the shorter volunteers. In a week or so we'll know for sure how well it worked.