By Bill Kleiman

February is not the ideal time for us to prepare fire breaks. Frozen ant mounds are hard to mow. The mowed vegetation does not dry well if you want to rake and blow it. A tractor with no cab makes you shiver. But we were short handed this fall and [insert various excuses]. We try to finish fire break preparation before winter.

Does anyone want to call this a good fire break?

Now that is a fire break. These wide fire breaks look about right when they have fire on one side, smoke streaming across, and your eyes are watering.

Followers of this blog will have seen that Nachusa uses a hay rake to move the mowed veg to one side. Then we use a tractor powered leaf blower to blow the windrows 5 to 10 yards out.

Above is a fire break mowed once there and once back. This section of line is the downwind fire break and there is a meadow adjacent and then further down wind a big oak woods. I want to keep the fire inside the box. So…

I tracked back with a skid loader and made three more passes and had it wide enough. Then I drove the hay rake to this back 40 section and raked the veg to the left side. I can see the windrow there. That day Molly drove by with the leaf blower and the windrows were flying.

These efforts will make the fire day go better. We have tens of miles of fire breaks so we have to use tractors to get the job done. Whatever tools you got, fire breaks make or break you.