Time for some Fall chores up at our cabin. Anyone who has dogs know they love to “help” with all kinds of things. Today, Freighter is the helpful pup.
Fall Means Pine Needles
Most people have to deal with falling leaves, but at our cabin we deal with falling pine needles because we are in a pine forest. This Fall we had a bumper crop of them.
In the past hubby raked and piled the needles up at the back of our property. The problem with that is this they do not break down very quickly. They dry out and that is a worry in the Spring when we have to worry about forest fires.
This past Spring the neighbor behind us decided to burn some brush and the fire got away from him and threatened our garage. Thank goodness the fire department was able to knock it down, but we decided that piling up dry things on the property is probably not a good idea. If you are in an area susceptible to forest fires, it is best to remove things that could fuel a fire. So we decided to burn the pine needles.
Dealing With Our Bumper Crop Of Needles
We waited for a dry day with just a bit of wind and blew all the needles into three big piles. We made sure to pick an area away from the house and any brush or trees and got the hose out…just in case. Then we got to burning the needles. We thought it would be a quick job, but those darn needles were damp and took forever to catch fire. If you look behind hubby in the photo, you can see another big pile of needles. As I said, we started out with three such piles. This chore took all day long.
If you need to burn leaves or needles, Fall is a good time because the ground is damp from morning dew/frost. As long as you are careful, our township allows for open burning during this time of year. However, the DNR does fly over at different times during the day looking for forest fires. Since we had smoke billowing from our property all day, they flew over to check several times. I bet they were wondering what was taking so long, but we decided to have one small fire rather than multiple larger fires.
Freighter Helps With Fall Chores
Over the course of the day, we brought the dogs out with to hang out with us. Freighter decided to “help”, but his idea of helping was sniffing all around where we were working. I am not sure what he was sniffing for, but he made a job of it.
Not only did we have to keep telling Freighter to get out of the smoke, but you think he could have grabbed a rake or something.
He has a odd idea of helping with Fall chores.
Do your dogs help with chores?
it’s a phenomenon… their nose is always next under or between our hands when we do something outside. We had our hellfire-day last week, we used a steel barrel to burn the needles, branches and some leaves. The smell was awful…. and the great helper landed in the bathtub :O)
Oh no not the bathtub!
Tallulah’s been “helping” our neighbors on her morning walks. A number of them have piles of sticks from cleaning their yards for fall. Tallulah is a sucker for a stick, and my human mommy has developed all kinds of new upper-body muscles trying to keep her away from the piles! Happy to see safely got rid of your pine needles, and that Freighter was such a big “help”!
What doggie would not be excited to see a big pile of sticks!
I try to help out when I can around the house, and in the kitchen. Bailie is our current nanny which is keeping her busy with Madison.
Madison is very cute.
Yuck, what a nasty chore. Freigher was a great helper.
It is done now thank goodness.
Maybe he was smelling for skunks or bad guys. He says it’s hard to sniff them out with all that stinky smoke, but he was willing to take one for the team.
LOL maybe, or maybe the bear that we heard was in the area.
Wow, I never thought about what a big (and potentially dangerous) chore that would be with a cabin in the forest. We are very sensitive to fires here in So Cal since we’ve been in a drought for so long. Smart to do one small fire and take it slow. And, hey, it’s always great to have extra “help.” 🙂
We typically get the same kind of help. What I love is when I’m raking leaves and the dogs keep walking through the piles and spreading them back around!
We had a lot of pine trees at our old house, and my hubby hated them! There’s a lot more hardwood trees at our new house, but now we have many more leaves to deal with! At least we don’t really have to worry about fires though, and it’s been raining all week anyway!