Careful with your ashes

It makes a big mess, but I always try and put water in my ash bucket and let it sit for a while before dumping it, hopefully it will prevent something like this.

Scary story, bro! Thanks for the reminder. I've been surprised by hot coals in days-old ash myself.

It is really interesting how a coal can be in a state of 'suspended animation' or really, 'suspended combustion'. Wrapped in a blanket of fluffy ash, it hardly gets any oxygen at all... but at the same time, it hardly loses any heat at all, either. It just sits there, hot and slowly slowly burning...

Eddy

I have a large outdoor brush pile that I will burn down on the first major snow. I then will dump all my ashes from the stove onto the ash pile that remains from the brush pile. There will not be anything to set on fire there.

Knowing better, I threw 1 week old ashes into the dumpster at work during the winter. I ran my hands thru the ashes to make sure nothing was warm. I KNOW a live coal can remain lit when insulated in ashes...an hour later a customer told me my dumpster was on fire. My boss questioned my 20+ years of experience. It was not my proudest moment

That's one of the reasons I dump my ashes on the garden, the safest place here in the woods. During heating season it's mostly dirt and not much to burn.

I like snowbanks for ash dumping. Not always available, but having two ash cans to begin with gives me about a two month holding/waiting period before I am desperate.

I've posted about my two-can method before but for those who don't know of it - I can get a month's worth into one can, then fill the other while the first is just sitting there. Once the second is full (or near full) I pick a good day to dump the one month old first can (and be pretty sure that the ashes are out). Then let the second can sit full of ashes while I fill the first... keep repeating until end of season. Last year I was able to pick snow or rain days to dump each time as well - not only minimizes the chances of anything burning but keeps the dust down.

Thought just struck me - had the woodshed burned I bet you would have seen a grown man cry there eh? (and a bunch of us here too perhaps in sympathy...)

Looks like they didn't even lose much of that old pile of rotting unsplit firewood (prolly rotting anyway, since it's directly on ground).

I do what mellow does - mix ashes and water and wait 24 hours to dump. I used to skip the water if the ashes were a couple weeks old, but Franks' story makes me think that wetting even those wouldn't hurt.

"Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg" sounds like it should be in Wales. They have some purty long place names there.

Peace,
- Sequoia

TreePapa said:

"Lake Chargoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg" sounds like it should be in Wales. They have some purty long place names there.

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A/k/a "Lake Webster", I believe, for the tongue-tied.

Question on Ashes in the Garden. When is too many? Lots of ashes, medium garden.

I do the same and put mine on my garden, my crop of tomatoes this past year was crazy! I guess it depends on how many cords you burn and how big your garden is. I burn about 2.5 cords and my garden is about 8ft x 16ft, I just dump them all over it during the winter then till them into the ground in the spring. I get the garden covered pretty good with the ash, about 1 inch cover.

Not sure if ash turns toxic in mass quantity? I am sure that you can always have to much of a good thing.

We put our ashes on the garden too bu wait until Spring to do it. All winter long we dump the ashes into those blue plastic barrels and then put them on the garden just before tilling. I should add that the ashes sit in the ash holder until the next time the stove needs cleaning out. Then the old ashes are put in the barrel while the new bunch sits outdoors in the ash container.

Good point and timely, too - as everyone gets back into full burning mode.

This actually brings up an interesting thought....a while ago, we had a delivery of activated charcoal headed to the local water treatment plant spill and spontaneously combust. Very fine carbon can actually do this - it's not uncommon at all for open pit coal mines out west do be digging away when all the sudden a patch of coal starts to burn simply on exposure to air. (don't seem to hear of this much in the east. I don't know if it is due to just having denser coal which may not be as prone to spontaneous combustion - or because they spray so much to keep the dust down the coal is already wet.)

Either way, my thought was - I wonder if it is possible for a coal, surrounded by ash to 'burn out' in such a manner it could spontaneously ignite again on exposure to air. Maybe you could have the ash bucket setting for weeks, give it a fling across the yard and have a coal start to burn again? Perhaps an experiment is in order...coal in an airtight pyrex flask, left to burn out on its own, then suddenly exposed to air after several weeks?

At any rate, those coals are very long lived when buried in ash - much longer than conventional wisdom would say they should last. It's important to always treat the ash bucket as though there are fire/live coals in it

Good post!!

Last year I came out the following morning after dumping coals in my metal trash(coal) can and the lid was still hot to the touch.

Phil from NY said:

Question on Ashes in the Garden. When is too many? Lots of ashes, medium garden.

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When there's snow and ice on the ground, the ashes go on the driveway. My garden is not very big, about 25x25 feet, figure 2 gallons of ashes each month during heating season, minus the months with snow and ice; maybe 6 gallons per year spread around, for the last 20 years that we've had the garden in that spot.

Whew, never thought about it that much! In conclusion, our soil is pure sand and the 6 gallons per year (plus some creosote) helps a lot. We usually have a nice crop of vegetables.

Ashes in the garden will depend a lot on what you are growing and what the local soil conditions are. If you have acidic soil loving plants, they probably won't like the ash much at all as it's pretty alkaline. If you have acidic soil and alkaline loving plants, lots of ash will help bring the pH up and everyone is happy. If you have alkaline soil and alkaline loving plants, too much ash can over-do it. Of course mixing leaves / compost into the soil with the corresponding tannic acid will help offset some of the ash addition.

Here, we sit on a giant bed of alkaline limestone anyway, water comes out of the faucet at about 8.2pH, so there is not a lot of need for added ash, though it's a great source of potassium and other micro nutrients.

Good post and a reminder to folks MikePinto . . .

As for me my ashes are dumped into a covered metal pail which sits on a concrete pad away from my house . . . I generally get 2-4 weeks of dumping before the pail fills up. I always wait at least a week . . . or sometimes two weeks before I dump the ashes in the woods . . . and typically I'll wait until it is raining outside and the ground is saturated or there is snow on the ground. If I have to dump the ashes and the ground isn't wet with snow or rain I will dump the ashes in the garden . . . usually I prefer to dump in the snow though so I don't over-saturate the garden with ash. In the winter if my driveway is ice covered or snow covered I'll sometimes dump the ash on to the driveway.

Yeah, I know . . . probably way over-kill on my part . . . but then again, it would look really bad to have the Public Education Officer catch the house or nearby woods on fire.