Fighting Fire: a Conundrum

Every spring at my suburban home, when the snows finally melt, I start removing last year’s dead grasses and flower stalks and cutting back the bushes, making way for new growth. It has the satisfying feeling of cleaning out your house after a long winter. And yet the latest advice for gardeners, in this age of climate change, is to endure the  messiness for an extra month or two. We should wait until later in spring to clean out last year’s detritus because insects, including bees, winter under the leaves and in the soil. With a worldwide decline in insects, it’s becoming more urgent to protect them, especially when they are the main food source for birds, which are also decreasing in number.

At the cabin, I’ve always let nature tend to itself (except for some watering of the trees in the hot, dry months), and, over the years, I observed that nature knows best. In the east yard this spring, I had to fight the tendency to pull out the dried grasses that were hiding the new shoots of grass and flowers. I’m glad I held back, because I can see that last year’s grasses protected this year’s shoots against cold temperatures and late snow, and provide mulch for the new grasses and food for the small animals.

Mid-summer I  have a beautiful meadow (above) of waving green grasses and flowers. But those tall grasses, especially once they start drying out, can add fuel to any wildfire. This became painfully true when a grass fire last December, pushed by 100-mph winds, destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Louisville and Superior, east of Boulder.

As the West warms and dries out, my mountain neighbors have been discussing how to prevent our places from being destroyed by wildfires. We’re thinning trees, especially the lower branches, and sawing down dead ones. I’m bagging pine cones and needles from around the edges of the cabin. I’ve hauled out pieces of wood from underneath the cabin.

As a fire preventive, a lot of my neighbors are cutting down the high grasses around their cabins this summer. This poses a conundrum for me, because I love the grasses mixed with flowers—white yarrow, yellow parsley, purple thistle, yellow and red blanketflowers—that surround the cabin. If I mow the grasses (not so easy on ground that’s more rock than soil), I not only lose this beautiful meadow, but the chipmunks (above) and ground squirrels lose their cover from predators, and emerging insects lose their protection.  

We’ve gotten a lot of rain in the past few weeks, so the fire danger is low (or at least moderate). For now, I’ll let nature take its course, even if that means tempting fate—in this case, the loss of my cabin to a wildfire. I'm not ready to lose the wildness.

Comments

[Sally Hanson]

Conundrum is the word, maybe wait till the grass dies or doesn’t that happen? Could you water the area occasionally? Maybe not enough water for that? Not sure how much effect we can have when things get sooooo dry?

[Brent]

Good read and photos. Have a lovely day in the mountains with nature.

[Kathy Kaiser]

Sally, I thought I would wait until the grasses start to die and then cut them back a bit. It's hard to water since I have no plumbing and would have to do it by hand. Hopefully, we'll keep getting enough moisture until it starts snowing next month.