The First Fire Pit Fire of the Season

The morning sun stretched its rays across the yard early this morning, welcoming a beautiful, glorious day.  By mid-day winds were whipping across the landscape, ushering in the coolest weather we've seen this fall.  After we picked up eggs, fed the animals and milked LuLu, I took the tarp off of the fire pit.  It seemed like the perfect evening to build a fire.

We have quite a few trees in the yard, mostly live oak, with some water oak and pecan thrown in there for good measure.  With each passing storm, the trees drop numerous branches, some small and some quite large that have to be cut into pieces.  Throughout the year, we gather up all the debris and pile it beside a big live oak next to the fire pit.  This pile serves as fuel for the fire pit as well as the barbecue pit.   

I started a roaring fire as I checked the temperature.  It was 54 degrees out, cool enough for a fire.  Overnight, the weather app we use said it'll get down to 39.  I tossed in a bunch of sticks and pulled the bench up close to the fire.  Tricia came and sat with me as we stared into the fire and talked.  The fire cracked and embers flew high up into the night sky.  Even Belle came up and visited us.  Her thick white coat keeps her warm on cold nights, and we thought fire scared her, but her desire for an ear rub outweighed her fear of fire.

The sticks and logs burned down and a nice bed of red hot coals glowed in the fire pit, reminding me that I should have picked up some sausage.  The fire pit has a grille that swings over the is perfect for cooking.  As I stared into the fire, I began to remember being a young boy in Boy Scouts.  We'd cook over campfires all the time.  As a side note, why does food cooked over a campfire always taste better?

In Scouts, one of the more popular meals we cooked was a dish called "Foil Meals."  Foil meals were simple to prepare and clean up.  You simply tore a square of foil and put a big patty of hamburger meat, heavily seasoned in the middle of the foil.  Then you'd slice onions, potatoes, carrots and anything else you wanted in there and you'd fold up the foil around the meat/vegetables in the middle and seal.

There were often arguments about whether to put the shiny side in or the shiny side of the foil facing out.  I think it cooks both ways.  You'd gently set the foil meal directly on the coals.  After about 10-15 minutes, a delicious aroma would waft across the campsite and it would beckon us to circle around the fire and pull our meals out.  We'd carefully unwrap them and eat the delicious meat and potatoes and vegetables directly out of the foil with a fork.  When you were finished, you balled up the foil and threw it away.  Good memories of meals eaten around a campfire!

After a while the fire burned down and we reluctantly went inside.  Before leaving, we vowed to enjoy many more evenings seated around the fire, weather permitting.  Next time we'll cook while we're sitting around it, though!

The Fire Pit Patio

It's almost "fire pit season."  That's the time of year that we build fires in the fire pit and sit outside and stare into the flames.  Peaceful.  Relaxing.  The photo below shows our fire pit.  The river rock square is a trip and fall hazard.  We normally put benches on the inside of the square and then back up when the fire is roaring.  The rocks do nothing but remind us that we have Build Fire Pit Patio as an item on our to do list.

Might as well do it since the weather is conducive to a little manual labor.  We marked out the size of our proposed patio, squared it up and got ready to drive in stakes to mark our corners and build our form.

I got out a mattock and began to work up a two inch indention in the rock-hard soil.

Finally we had it all done and moved the dirt out of the way in wagons!  That was more work than I thought it was going to be.

The form was constructed and we went to the local hardware store and bought 80 pound bags of gravel mix concrete.

Pouring concrete is hard.  The last time I did it I threw out my back mixing it with a shovel and shoveling it into place.  There has to be an easier way.  We found on You Tube a method called "Dry Pouring Concrete.  After watching the videos, we felt like this was the thing to do.  I'll show you the process.

First, you pour the bags of concrete into the form.  Use a long 2 x 4 to screed.  Our problem was that our form was bigger than any 2x4 that we had.  This meant that we were unable to level it properly, even going side to side from the corners.  I would have liked it to have been smoother, but it wasn't to be.  Once we had it as level as we were going to get it, we used a paint roller to smooth out the bigger ridges.

The powder is there.  Now you take a water hose and set it to mist.  Mist the concrete until it turns a darker color gray.

In exactly an hour, you do mist it again.  An hour following that, you set the garden hose sprayer to "shower" and shower the concrete real good.  An hour later you do it again.  An hour later you do it again.  (For every inch of thickness, you shower it in one hour intervals.)

Once that was done, we decided to dress it up a little by soldiering pavers on the surrounding edges.  We laid a base of sand and leveled the pavers with the slab.

We were going to put a plastic edging around the entire thing, but decided to make a concrete retainer.  We used the 'dry pour' method with this as well.  We poured the concrete powder and used a concrete edging tool to put the powder at a 45 degree angle about halfway up the paver.  We misted and sprayed.  This edge will keep the pavers from sliding.

Between the pavers, we poured polymeric sand, packing it in, sweeping it in and then used a leaf blower to blow off the excess.  Then we showered it in.

I pulled the dirt over the outer concrete retainer so that it met with the edge of the pavers.  We like the way it turned out.

We intend on spending many upcoming evenings outside enjoying the new fire pit patio.  It's not a perfect construction project, by any stretch of the imagination, but the job is complete and I'm sure we'll enjoy it.

It's Fire Pit Season!

I check the weather report and tomorrow, December 9th, the weather prognosticators tell us that we will be knocking on the door of 80 degrees for the high and 70 degrees for the low.  But, on the several cool evenings we've had, we've lit a few fires in our fire pit.  There are few things more relaxing to me than lighting a fire in the fire pit and sit around and watch it burn.  

Sometimes I'll get the fire stoked up too hot and we'll have to scoot the bench back a bit.  Other times the fire will die back a bit and we'll scoot it back up close.  Other than that it's just sitting there, peacefully watching the embers, listening to the coals crackle and pop.  The scent of burning hardwood is nice and the roaring fire takes the chill out of the air.

We're constantly gathering limbs that fall out of the many trees in our yard and stacking them by the fire pit to use as fuel.  Sometimes we'll wait for the wood to turn to red-hot coals and the daylight to turn to dark.

Then we'll swing the grill back over the fire pit and cook something for supper.  On this particular night, we warmed up some leftover homemade soup over the fire.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like everything cooked outside tastes better!  (Many) more fire pit fires left to come.  With it being 80 degrees tomorrow, we'll likely not light the fire pit up tomorrow, though.

Redfish on the Half-Shell

Yesterday's post was about catching fish.  Today's post is about eating fish!  Our neighbors were looking to make some room in their deep freeze and asked if we'd like some fish?  How could we say no?  We thawed out the red fish and in the late afternoon, we built a nice fire in our fire pit with some pecan wood and let the wood burn down to make a nice coal bed. 

Once the fish were thawed out we seasoned them up with Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning, butter and lemon juice.  Here they are - redfish on the half-shell:

The reason they are called Red fish on the half-shell is that they are filleted but one side still has the scales on it.

The "shell" makes it perfect for just laying the fish right on the grill.  It doesn't stick.  It's hard to burn.  We sliced up some onions, mushrooms, squash, and peppers and put them on the grill, too.  Soon, the fish were cooking.  We sat outside around the firepit and visited while the fish finished up.

We monitored the temp on the fish until they were done.  The smaller fish cooked quicker, so we allowed the bigger ones to continue cooking while we went inside and began to eat while all the food was hot.

The fish were DELICIOUS!  Even though the weather is getting a little cool.  The mosquitoes aren't as bad as during the spring and summer and cooking out is relaxing and enjoyable - something that we'll be doing more often.

Breaking in the New Fire Pit

This past fall we were looking at our flimsy old fire pit that was about to rust out. We new it would not last the season and began thinking about getting a new one.  We happened to stop at Bucc-ee's just east of Houston and saw a heavy duty fire pit and put it on our wish list.  A bit later we got in the truck and drove back to pick it up. 

Sitting in front of a fire is one of the most relaxing things.  Research has shown that it lowers blood pressure.  It has been, so far, a very mild winter.  During the first cool snap that we had, we lit a small fire in it. This thing is heavy-duty and won't be rusting out any time soon.  It has a rail that you can kick your feet up on while you kick back and enjoy the fire.

The many trees in the yard constantly lose branches that we pile up to fuel the many fires that we light.  We decided that we would really break in the fire bit with a nice fire.  The manufacturer recommends building a roaring fire in it and allowing it to burn for at least four hours to cure it.  We kept the fire burning for much longer than that.

Another neat amenity that our new fire pit has is that it has a grill that pivots on a hinge away from the fire and can be easily pulled off completely if you are not cooking.  Once we had some nice coals in the pit, we put some good burgers on the grill from our homegrown bull.

Our last fire pit did not have a grill to cook on.  This is a big added plus!

After flipping the burgers, we put slices of provolone cheese, grilled onions and mushrooms, homemade salsa, and a sliced avocado on top of the burger and placed on a bed of some fresh lettuce coming out of the garden now along with a side of baked Beauregard Sweet Potatoes we dug up this fall.  We ate like kings and queens!

Two thumbs up rating on the new fire pit.  We look forward to sitting in front of it for years to come!

Colorful Campfire

Yesterday we talked about the beautiful bright red color of Bull’s Blood Beets.  It got me to thinking about a recent fire we built in our fire pit in the backyard.  Quite often we will gather up all the sticks that fall out of the trees in our yard and we'll burn them in our fire pit.  We will place our patio chairs around the pit, light it up and enjoy just sitting around the fire, visiting and staring into the flames.

But why did the bright color of Bull's Blood Beets get me thinking about a fire in the fire pit? 

Benjamin stoking the fire

Benjamin collects metals of all kinds, including aluminum, brass, and copper.  He'll gather up a bunch of it and take it to a recycling center in Lake Charles to redeem for cash.  If you look at the 3 o'clock position on the fire pit below you'll see a coiled up piece of copper.  That's not part of a moonshine still.  He was seeing if he could make the copper melt, but we determined that copper melts at 1,984 degrees Fahrenheit.  A campfire will only get about 930 degrees.  So while he found that he couldn't melt the copper, he could sure get it soft enough to hammer it all out flat.

Heating up copper

As he heated the copper we started to notice something odd, though.

See anything strange?

First a little bit...

Green Flames

And then a lot!  The flames leaping up out of the fire pit above where he had laid the pieces of copper were a beautiful green color!

Why is this happening?  Why does burning copper cause green flames?  Well, Google told me that green flames are caused by burning copper.  Now I barely remember these terms from high school chemistry, but apparently when you burn copper, you free valence electrons and make ions.  The energy that the electron gives off in this process is emitted as a photon in the color of green.

It sure was pretty, but I'm not going to pretend I still remember what an ion or photon is!  Sure is pretty though.

Be Ye Not Conformed

This past week we had the Youth Group over to the house for what was intended to be a Bonfire and fellowship.  Most of the youth were out of school for Spring Break and it was the last real chilly weather of the season with overnight temperatures dipping into the 30's.  Perfect night for a bonfire, except for the fact that we had very strong winds from the northeast.  Winds from that direction would create a fire hazard since our barn sits to the east of our burn pile.

I had high hopes that by nightfall the winds would diminish, enabling us to light the fire and send sparks high into the night air, warming us and providing us with a nice evening.  It wasn't to be.  No worries.  Plan B involved a fire pit with a bunch of sticks I'd gathered from the yard.  It always helps to have a back-up plan since things have a way of not going exactly as planned.  Be adaptable and resilient.  We ended up having a great night.

Gathering around the fire pit

So using the house as a blockade from some of the wind whipping from the north, we started the fire in the fire pit and got some good coals burning.  Armed with Flaming Hot Cheetos and youthful enthusiasm, we gathered around the fire.  Russ was the master chef of the evening.  He has a neat grill thing in his hand where he is roasting some hot dogs over the fire.  In addition to chips, we had hot dogs, cold drinks, brownies, homemade cookies, fruit, and a strawberry banana dessert.


What a great group of kids!

After eating we had a devotional around the campfire centered around the following verses:

Romans 12:1-2 I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may that prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Keep the fire burnin'

We talked about presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice and what that meant.  We talked about the fact that they are each a Child of the King - Princesses and Princes, and are highly favored by our Heavenly Father.  We discussed keeping our bodies pure as they are a temple of the Holy Spirit.  Finally we talked about not conforming to the world.

I'm 46.  I remember what it was like to be young.  I wish I could tell you that I was perfect, but I can't.  These kids are good kids - really good kids.  They are bombarded at school by temptation and influences that I didn't have to deal with at their age.  Their innocence has been under attack by a world that has them in its cross hairs.  Our kids need our prayers.  Our kids need parents who will stand up and be counted and lead.  Our kids need leaders whose lives and actions match their talk.  God, I hope that I can be that type of person for them.  Parenting is the hardest thing I've ever done.  A good buddy and I often repeat that phrase to each other.


Smiles everyone, Smiles!

While looking at the burning coals, we talked about letting our lights so shine that others might see our good works and glorify our Father in Heaven.  We don't want to hide our lights under a bushel basket.  We want to be in the world, but not of it.  At the same time we talked about being careful.  I used the illustration of someone standing on a bench.  Is it easier for the person standing on the bench to pull someone up to his level or for someone below him to pull him down to theirs?  It's easier to be pulled down.  I challenged them to keep the faith and not be pulled down into peer pressure and ungodly influences and temptation.  

Walking the walk

We sang a song around the campfire.  Remember the song "Pass it On"?  

It only takes a spark, to get a fire going?
And soon all those around can warm up to its glowing,
That's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it,
You spread the love to everyone
You want to pass it on.

Shout it from the Mountaintop!

The group ran around in the pasture with the animals, climbed trees and went down the zip line and eventually got flashlights and ran around the yard playing hide and seek or flashlight army.  I think it is safe to say they had a great time.  It made me think longingly of similar times from my childhood.  Nights that you wished would never end.

Nice fire roaring

As the night got cooler, more and more sticks got added to the fire making the fire leap as everyone sat around it talking and laughing with fingers stained red with Flaming Hot Cheetos stuff on them. 

Flames leaping into the air

Our little fire pit couldn't contain the fire and burning coals fell out of the pit and onto the ground starting new fires, providing a perfect lesson on which to end evening.  What started out as a small spark, became an all-consuming fire which the vessel could not contain.  That fire then overflowed the fire pit and birthed new fires expanding and burning in different directions, threatening to spread out and touch everything in the vicinity. 

Light the fire in my soul

May the fire of Christ's love do the same in our lives and not be extinguished.  May our fires burn flaming hot!

We're feeding the cats too much

Here's a sure fire way to find out if you are feeding the cats too much Cat Chow.  If you set a trap in the feed room in the barn and catch one almost immediately followed by another... and another... and another and so on and so forth, you're feeding them too much.  The body count is at 9 now since Thanksgiving and counting, and I continue to bait the traps and catch one more each day.  This is not a catch and release program.  Those boogers love pecans - that's what I bait the traps with.  The rat death toll rises in inverse proportion to my satisfaction level with our farm cats.  Doggonit.  This is their job.  They've become fat, lazy, and dependent and have allowed the rat population in the barn to grow while they slept on the job.  That ends today.  I've scheduled a performance appraisal with both of the cats.  They are going to have to step it up!


"You disgust me."  " Prove it!"  Okay!  (You've seen that commercial, right?)

This morning we were awakened by Magnolia mooing loudly - intermittently but frequently.  Tricia checked the calendar and sure enough, she's in heat, proving that the broken fence 21 days ago during her last cycle did not result in Maggie's pregnancy by Stryker, the Jersey bull.  This is a good thing.  We want to space out our milk cows' calf deliveries so as not to have 3 cows in milk at the same time.  We don't have enough farm hands around our house for that much activity!


Stryker, the amorous Jersey Bull

 Over the Thanksgiving Holidays, Tricia's mom came in from South Texas for a visit along with one of her brothers from Houston.  We had a nice time visiting, eating, relaxing, etc.  My parents gave me a fire pit for my birthday and I took it out of the box for its inaugural burning.  It was really relaxing to start a nice fire going.  We arranged the patio chairs around it.  Russ pulled out his guitar and strummed a few chords and Tricia's brother, David, played some tunes for us.  Of course we roasted marshmallows and sang and talked until the fire burned out.  I like the new fire pit!



Anyone know any campfire songs?

The weather was just perfect for sitting out by a fire - not too hot, but not too cold.  We burned a lot of the pecan branches from the yard.  A good time was had by all.

I have to show you the camellias.  They are in full bloom right now with a gazillion more buds about to open as you can see in the photo below.


Camellia Sasanqua

I primarily like to grow things that you can eat, but these plants are stunning in their color and beauty that a picture just can't do justice to.  To me, camellias remind me of the South, even though they originated in the Far East.  Their blooms stand out as lots of times, they are the only colorful thing blooming in the Fall.

I'll leave you with a smile, literally.  A breakfast consisting of fresh raw milk, fresh scrambled eggs from the hens topped off with Tabasco sauce, homemade blueberry biscuits topped with homemade seedless blackberry jelly and a slice of bacon (store bought) brings a smile to my face - and my plate smiled back at me!


A happy plate