Mind if I smoke?

You may remember that we were working on clearing our back 0.6 acre pasture way back in January. It was completed sometime in April with about 8 huge burn piles. To have the excess brush hauled away was putting it way out of the budget (the trees were taken to the clearing company's mill). We were waiting for the brush to thuroughly dry and some good wet weather to come our way before burning. Well, we got it. Fay, Gustav and Hanna provided some moisture for safe burning. Saturday the wind forecast was nice and gentle so at first light, Randy was out lighting a fire. By 8:30 we had 2 fire trucks, a police chief and a couple volunteers in our yard. We had discussed the situation with my brother-in-law (one of the firemen on duty) about it before hand. He assured us that someone would definitely call it in, but that they would come out, look at it and tell us to continue as planned. Well, apparently SOOOO many people called reporting a house fire that they had also dispatched 2 units from Port Orange, the tower truck and paramedics. My brother-in-law saw it was "just us" and canceled all units. The problem was not risk of fire. Randy did a great job preparing and tending. The trouble was that the smoke wasn't rising. It hung low and smoked out the entire northern section of Florida Shores. As I was leaving for a meeting, I was still smelling smoke on US1. For those of you not local- that's almost 2 miles of smoke. We were instructed to call the division of forestry who agreed that this was a great time to burn and told us to continue. Thankfully, the smoke did start rising. This pile burned until 5:45 when Randy tried to put it out so we could safely leave for the evening. He couldn't get it out even after an hour and a half of shoveling and hosing. He stayed home while I left with Aaron. At midnight we were shutting off the lights and I noticed our back yard glowing. We both went out to again try to extinguish it. Got it, again, down to embers in the center of the pile. At 1am I woke up and checked. Again flames were going. I went out and hosed it down to a smolder. I checked it again at 3- the pile was glowing but I didn't see flames so I went back to sleep. At 4, the flames were back so I again hosed it down. At 6:30, Randy went out and did some shoveling and hosing again. Since then there has been a continuous stream of smoke, but no flames. 2 days later, still smoking and still a LOT left to burn. We really don't know what to do with the rest of the piles. We were not expecting to find this many HUGE logs beneath all the scrub. These piles could take 5 days to burn and they are a bit close to homes to risk that. So... we're back to the idea of finishing the fence and letting the goats go wild in there until we can save enough to have it all hauled away.
In other news, grass is still trying to get up through the plastic and weed cloth in the garden. I patched places and added more mulch this morning. I killed my seedlings thinking it would rain. I had sunflowers, cucumbers, brocolli, amaranth, sage and thyme coming up... all dead by my own laziness in not wanting to do something I thought mother nature would do for me. Alas, live and learn. Thankfully we still have plenty more seeds of each variety.
We also placed a chicken order today. 10 cornish rocks and 20 plymoth rocks. The cornish rocks are for eating (all but one lucky rooster). The male plymoths, however many there are, will mostly all be for eating. We'll save 1 or 2 for breeding. The hens are for laying and breeding. We're going to try hatching our own at some point. Maybe crossing the cornish rocks with the plymoth rock to try to get some of their original size back. They used to be an enormous bird back when dual purpose meant something. Now they are bred to be small so that the feed ratio is better for laying purposes.
While on the topic of breeding, I started drying Fudge off today. She's been giving only 4 oz of milk lately. We want her dried off and bred as soon as possible. Hopefully the next post will be one of expectancy!