The real flattening

In the forest, right now I am picking weeds and moving all the bamboo from the floor over to the north where I stack them neatly and wait for them to dry so I can burn them. The bamboo that cannot be piled up cause they are too small or too old, I just throw in a pile near the center. That pile is where I get the bamboo to burn right now.
Anyway, it took me 3-4 more hours to burn the rest of that pile from last time.

All done. No pile left.

Of course, a new pile had built up almost immediately after I had done more clearing out...

Episode IV: A New Pile

So that's how the burning goes. Every day the clear area around the burn barrel gets wider and wider. And now I arrived at the big heap of branches that I had gathered and put in the middle of the plot. It's almost like a wall, and has to go somewhere else if I am to continue clearing the plot.

The branches

It looks simple enough, but actually it's much bigger than it seems. The weight is pressing the branches down together so they look much smaller and fewer. I started to haul them over to the north, behind the stacks of bamboo. At least for now it is a good place for them to be. Later I will burn them little by little...

3 hours later...

Moving them took much more time than I expected. Maybe cause I was extra careful cause lots of tiny leaf frogs had chosen that heap to hide in cause every time I lifted a bunch a few frogs jumped out and away to hide among the leafs nearby.

This is where I moved them

The north side is covered now with all kind of things, and it is almost impossible to see where my plot begins. First, I chopped all the bamboo in the public land and laid them there, then I put some thick bamboos on my side as posts so they wouldn't roll down. Then I laid a few more bamboos behind the posts on my side as extra support, all that formed a thick strip along the north, made of bamboo, half of which is on my plot. During my weed clearing I just tossed all the weed on top of the strip which dried quickly and has started to decompose. Now the strip looks a lot like just soil, but underneath it is still bamboo. So if someone who doesn't know looks at it, the norther slope which marked the border to my land is now 2-3 meters inside my land. Therefore it is important that all this north strip is just temporary and that I burn it as soon as I can so the original slope can be seen again.
My bamboo stacks are just south of that strip, and I have now filled the tiny gap there was between the strip and the stacks, with branches.

It's a mess

Going back to the wall of branches, one more day and the whole thing was finally moved over to its new home.

No more branch wall

Let the flattening commence. Once the weed and the bamboo on the floor is cleared away, I will spend time burning bamboo mostly. In between burning, I will chop down sugi trees in my plot and also bamboo trees in my north neighbor plot, after I get OK from him.