Carbon footprint? What carbon footprint?

It being out of fire-ban season and the weeds having grown alarmingly during the wet of last year we had a big pile of stuff to ignite.
We compost most of the weeds which we collect (my guess is that over a year that heap is almost the same size as that pictured, but it gets recycled back into the garden beds).  However some things are just too invasive, long lived or woody to be composted.  The invasive component includes Serrated Tussock, Brambles, Sweet Briar, Hypericum (both the garden variety and St John's Wort) and Periwinkle.  The woody lot include prunings from our fruit trees and vines.  Bits of willow meet both criteria.

The weather for 2 June looked excellent: cool. cloudy and light winds, plus we had showers forecast for the previous day. So I rang the RFS on Tuesdayand let them know I planned a pile burn for today.  I also let the neighbours know things were likely to get a bit smoky.

One of the things that has interested me in previous years has been how the heap has declined.   So this year I decided to to take images every twenty minutes to show this.  So here we go with 4 images from time 0 to 60 minutes later.



I had set the camera up on a tripod so that the pix were all taken from the same spot.  Unfortunately it went to sleep between images and I didn't get the zoom exactly right  each time.  This shows the camera position (the next several images are courtesy of Frances).
In that image I have obviously failed "Road Worker 1" as I am not actually leaning on my shovel.  The tripod is visible in the centre of the image.  The next image shows I also failed Golf 1, since the putting style is woeful.

In one of our favourite Irish songs "Lanigans Ball" the chorus is along the lines of "We spent 6 months in Dublin, learning the steps for Lanigan's Ball."  Perhaps I should have repeated the course?
May I misquote Mae West in her question to a policeman sent to guard her?  In this case her question could have referred to a hosepipe!
The final image suggests that I was correct to warn the neighbours about smoke.  According to my memory of Native American communications technology (according to the Duke) this is probably telling several tribes to get to Little Big Horn!


Of course if my smoke signal was received by the Hekawi tribe it would be taken as on order for Matzah balls with a side of gefilte fish.

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