 A pile of wood mulch smoldering. |
Fire Alert!
- Potting soil and soilless mixes are flammable!
- Mulch and compost on your garden can ignite and smolder for hours or days!
- Putting cigarettes out in plants or flicking them into the landscape is a potential fire!
Garden stuff is flammable!
If you've ever driven your lawn tractor through a pile of leaves in the fall, only to ignite them from the mower's hot muffler, you know well, what I am talking about. Garden mixes, mulch, compost, fertilizers, cigarettes, and dry conditions can be a disaster waiting to happen. After a Wisconsin man, returning home from a vacation, found a melted pot and the melted remains of the plastic table it had been sitting on he asked Consumer Reports to investigate. They tested bags of potting soil by tossing a lighted cigarette into the mix. The products in the bag caught fire enough to smolder for over an hour.
Why the Alert?
Well, many of us use products such as wood chips, leaves, grass and peat moss, as additives or as mulch on our gardens and in our container plantings. We tend to forget about the obvious and sometimes a second thought can stop a situation from happening.
For example, I sometimes use pine needles in my front flower bed just off the deck - they make a great weed suppressant. It's pretty and durable and saves my back and knees from the pain of weeding long hours. It really is not a good idea. I thought of this one day while cleaning out the sand trays on the deck. If just one person had tossed their half lit cigarette in that garden, I might not be enjoying that deck, or worse yet, may have been caught in a house fire during the middle of the night. I am in the process of removing it and am considering rock for a replacement.
Many gardens or pots are located within close proximity of your house or a building. Landscapes, which use lots of dried mulches for weed and aesthetic purposes, are many times, along the foundations of a house. If you are a container gardener, pots full of peat and fertilizers are on your deck or patio. Letting your plants become dried out, not having someone water them while you are on vacation, setting old pots full of dried mix near your house, all are hazards.
During dry spells, mulch can become quite dry along the top layer, yet stay moist at ground level. Plants in the gardens are in a perpetual state of growth and death, with dried leaves close to that dry layer of mulch. In addition, many potting mixes contain fertilizer or chemical pesticides that by themselves, are highly flammable. Couple them with peat moss and you have a steady burn. New products such as rubber pellets or rubber mats are slow to ignite but once on fire, are extremely hard to put out.
A lit cigarette on a compost pile of leaves or grass may not seem like a danger - after all the grass is rotting and wet and there is plenty of moisture in the pile, but if it gets hot enough to smolder, it could work its way to a more flammable substance - such as your siding, your deck floor or your barn. Compost piles themselves, get extremely hot inside and with the right conditions, can smolder or even ignite. The smoldering may be deep within the pile and can go on for days or even weeks. So if you see smoke coming out of your compost pile, do not try to open it up (igniting it into flames), call your local fire department.
Stay Diligent, Take Precautions
So what is the solution? Don't stop mulching your garden or using peat moss. As with all things, caution and observation go a long way. Whether you are the smoker, your family or your visitors, leave out clay pots filled with sand in convenient places. Set a rock in the center so they can snub out the ember. Keep fire extinguishers nearby. Water your gardens and containers periodically during dry spells, and remove old soil and dried plants from unused pots. If you see someone smoking that is not familiar with your smoking rules, politely ask them not to, or direct them to the proper disposal of the finished cigarette. After all, a fire could not only damage your garden or your container pots, but it could take out your house, or even worse.
