Burn, Baby, Burn

Who doesn't love a bonfire?

I'm an avid composter. I love having a place for my food scraps and garden debris, where they can sit and rot and eventually have their nutrients returned to the soil. I have been known to tuck apple cores and banana peels into my pocket, to carry them home and add them to my compost pile rather than throw them in the trash. We have maintained brush piles of dead sticks and other organic material that's not suitable for the compost pile, and we have sometimes buried branches to retain their carbon content in the ground.

But some habits have to change.

We have collected an awful lot of debris from our orchard. Many of the peach branches are diseased, and the old raspberry canes and apple trimmings have the potential to carry disease. Many types of fungus can survive a compost pile. So we're burning it all. Which is actually kinda fun.