Fire...in OUR yard!

I've been talking on this blog about the fires in Austin, and today I experienced one much closer to home.  Luckily no one was hurt and nothing was damaged except our fence.

One of my boys said, rather calmly,"Mom, why is there a fire in our backyard?"  I 

looked out the back window and could see flames coming under our fence from our  neighbor's yard.  I grabbed the boys and we headed out the front door, then ran back with a hose and started dousing the flames.

Almost immediately, Stella, our neighbor to the right showed up with her hose in hand (her 8 year old had told her...Way to go kids!)   I then took my kids and neighbor's younger girls across the street to another neighbor, who's husband joined us while she watched the kids.  When we got back to the yard Stella's teenage daughter was out there helping too...(and in our back neighbor's yard where the fire had started, a police officer who had seen the smoke was helping their kids hose it down).  The fire was out before the firefighters came.  They weren't able to determine what started it.

That was the lid to a sandbox.  I was trying to kill

some grass in that corner to put a bush there.  Guess

that won't be a problem now.

You can see how far along the fence it burned.   You can see how far along the fence it burned.  That big green spot it missed?  That's where my strawberries were.  To keep them alive this hot summer I watered them more than the rest of the yard, and the little green circle where the sprinkler reached was exactly the area the fire missed.  That shows the difference  a healthy well watered lawn makes during a fire (and what a hazard a dry one is).  But we've been on watering restrictions this summer, so you do what you can do.