Bonfires 101.

Written by Daniel

21st June, 2013.

When I agreed to help write a couple of posts for the blog, Clare assured me that she would give me detailed notes, to help remind me what we had got up to on each day. With that in mind, here are her full notes for this post:  

"You weren't there, mannn. Vietnammm." 

Helpful much? Thankfully, I remember enough to know that this was bonfire day. Hold on, everyone, we'll be alright.

 
The day started, as many days in the garden do, with Clare seizing the opportunity to take some snaps of the tadpoles in the pond, to see how they were growing. Meanwhile, I was trying to move the bonfire further away from the pond, and making sure that any creatures hiding within were out of harm's way before we lit the fire.  As it turned out, I needn't have worried for a while, since lighting the fire was something of an anti-climax.

Within 15 minutes or so, we had used up the few matches we had, with only a few wisps of smoke to show for our efforts, and so MAJ had to make a run to Tesco to buy more matches and firelighters.

Once we had the correct provisions, we got the fire going pretty quickly, and it made light work of the pile of old branches and sticks that we had assembled.  Unfortunately, not everything was as dry as it could have been, which meant lots of smoke, so the three of us spent most of the afternoon facing the opposite direction and trying not to breathe in. 

When we did manage to turn around, though, the fire looked great as you can see from Clare's photos, and burning away all the old garden rubbish has helped to clear plenty of space for future gardening!

In the evening, having succeeded in smoking out half of Folkestone, we decided to leave the fire to burn out in its own time, and went to get some burgers and chips to mark the end of phase 1 of the gardening odyssey!