Incinerate!

With several things on our garden-related shopping list today and Mr Weatherman promising heavy rain later, we made an early start and took breakfast at the garden centre this morning. The bacon baps and toasted teacakes were excellent, so this may become a semi-regular thing (constrained only by the slight ache in the wallet caused by paying £5.25 for a bacon bap).

No visit to Woodford is complete without a full tour of the grounds, so along with the planned purchases of an incinerator, a fat snax holder for the bird feeder, and some rooting compound, we ended up with a trolley full of goodies including this rather attractive dianthus which now graces the deck, and a compact patio clematis (down there on the right) whose colour might have been especially bred to match the tub vacated by our dogwood, which we planted out in the border the weekend before last.

I left all the planting and arranging to Nikki. My attention was focused on man things. Assembling the incinerator (a rather grand title for the simple task of screwing its three feet on) and getting started with the burning.

I've had a lifelong fascination with fire, almost to the point of pyromania. It explains the large, strangely shaped scar on my right hand, and manifested itself when I was a child in hours spent in the woods collecting fallen branches, building bonfires and watching them burn. And then returning to the embers the following Saturday to rake them back into life and begin the whole process over again.

Using a garden incinerator isn't quite as satisfying as that - having to wait until the wood has burned down before adding more slows the whole process down too much - but it comes a close second. In the end the promised rain didn't arrive and I was able to keep the fire going from noon until late afternoon, reducing the stack of oily floorboards by about a third and seeing off the various lengths of pruned tree completely.

In the intervals between loading wood into the bin, and picking up the odd smoking remnant that fell out, I busied myself collecting bricks from the site and stacking them by the wall, along with sorting the multitude of detritus that litters the area into piles of keepers and chuckers.

After four hours the air holes in our shiny new incinerator were totally blocked with ash, which had built up to more than half fill the bin. This slowed down the rate of burn considerably. It wasn't shiny any more either. The galvanising, or whatever had given it that shiny appearance, had all burned off within the first five minutes. I waited until the fuel level dropped below the rim, slotted the chimneyed lid into place, and left the rest of the burning for another day.