Make a Brush Pile - PEP BB animal.sand.pile

As most of my projects do, this took over a year to complete. But it worked out!
Tree trimmings from my cottonwood and apricot trees were dragged into an area, left, added to, and reshuffled.

A clarification on dimensions, the fence pictured is ~6' tall

For reference, I'm 5' 1/2" so I'm using my height to measure the height of the pile and the measuring tape is set to 5ft. I also trimmed back the branches in the before picture and dropped it into the pile to make space for a 5ft pile. I'm a little concerned about the fire risk of making such a large brush pile. I need to look into this...

To complete this BB, the minimum requirements are:
 - you must make a brush pile at least five feet tall and five feet wide
 - dense enough that you can't see through the pile

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, you must:
See attachment 1  - post a picture of a location without a brush pile
See attachment 2  - post a picture of the brush pile under construction
See attachment 3  - post a picture of the completed brush pile at that same spot that is obviously at least five feet tall and five feet wide

I made a brush pile 5ft tall and 5ft wide under an oak tree near our garden area.

No BB required here but 20 years ago I did my first brush piles.They were mostly spruce brush but some mixed hardwood. The beetle bug disease was going around the white pine and spruce. To curb it, the forest was thinned of spruce, and selective heavy pruning of poor hardwood trees (multiple trunks sprouting minimized to one, etc)

I left the perimeter spruce and thankfully they all lived.

I got good help to fell trees and topping and cutting to chunks of 6-8' and spent the next 3 years dragging chunks that were no good for burning in the wood furnace to the 12' campfire, beginning with the tops, making brush piles with the rest as I went.

Growse moved in really quickly

Created a brush pile this evening while cleaning up the yard and gardens. My daughter is 5' 1" and plays a disappearing act behind the pile showing density and height.

whoops, do this by accident without knowing about the concept.  Large old apt complex with little "forests" between buildings. I drag the windfall away from the street public sidewalk due to cigarrete butts etc. I find the piles settle (?compost?) down and harbor lots of small critters. Hooray!  There is a name for my weirdness!

To complete this BB, the minimum requirements are:
- you must make a brush pile at least five feet tall and five feet wide
- dense enough that you can't see through the pile

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, you must:
- post a picture of a location without a brush pile
- post a picture of the brush pile under construction
- post a picture of the completed brush pile at that same spot that is obviously at least five feet tall and five feet wide

This last year I built a small garden bed and established a brush pile next to it. I have been slowly adding any fallen stick and felled tree I clean up around my property. A lot of this brush pile came from an old trash pile we found out in the field. Everyone we talked to thought it was weird that we didn't want to just burn the trash pile since that is what everyone else does.

Here is the rough area with nothing on the ground:


Here is my garden under construction with no brush pile next to it:


Here is the trash pile we found. Most of it is sticks:


I started hauling sticks over to my pile:


I got a nice pile going:



Here is the garden-in-progress next to the growing brush pile:


Here is my garden this year, freshly planted with the growing brush pile next to it:


Here is my garden later in the season. I'm not much of a gardener yet but look at those Jerusalem artichokes!


For scale, I put a stool next to the brush pile to show that it is well over the size requirement. The stool is about 39 inches long (a little over 3 feet).


Here is the stool next to the brush pile. The pile is taller than me and I'm 5'7". The top was hard to get stacked up.


Here is another angle: