This spring, we burned our brush pile. It had accumulated over a few seasons, and had become quite the mess, so we enlisted the help of our friend Allen to torch it. He brought his handy flamethrower, which is basically a metal tube connected to a propane tank.
This fall, we’ve accumulated another big pile of brush. Our summer yardwork, and the fall cleanup, left us with a lot of plant debris. Obviously we’re going to be burning this stuff every year (twice a year, in fact), so we decided to invest in our own flamethrower.
Today was the day. October is open-burn season in the county, so we went to work. I connected everything, lit the end, and stepped up to the pile of somewhat wet brush.
Although it looks like all that grass and little twigs would go up in a huge inferno, there’s been enough snow and rain that everything was kind of damp. It took a bit of work shoving the flamethrower into various parts of the pile, but finally the flames caught.
We felt like we were becoming true Montanans when we bought a chainsaw, and now with the addition of a flamethrower, we can feel even more like the natives. How cool is it to stand next to a huge pile of flaming grass holding a twenty-pound tank of explosive propane?