The Fire-Ready Garden: How to Make Your Yard Safer

Studies reveal that up to 80% of homes lost to wildland fires could have been saved with proper vegetation clearance and the establishment of defensible space.

Poor landscaping practices in fire-prone areas can exacerbate and intensify wildfire spread, complicating efforts for firefighters to contain and manage the flames. Prioritizing Fire-Resistant Landscaping and preparation is vital to reducing these risks.

In part seven of our Program Priority Series, our expert guest Al Murphy gives us an overview of wildfire preparedness. In this episode, Al covers:

• What the wildfire preparedness program priority is
• Changes that Al has seen in how communities approach wildfire risk
• Defensible space and home landscapes
• The home ignition zone
• Common landscaping practices that unintentionally increase wildfire risk
• Firewise gardens vs. low-maintenance and drought-tolerant landscapes
• Climate change’s role in weather extremes
• The wildland urban interface
• Simple steps to start protecting your home from wildfires
• Alternatives for organic mulches for use around homes
• How a fire-prone yard affects the homes around It
• Experiences that have shaped how Al thinks about people and fires
  

• WSU Chelan-Douglas County: Firewise Landscapes
• Arborvitae Alternatives Brochure
• Learn About the Home Ignition Zone
• Defensible Space: Practical Steps to Wild Fire Resilience
• WSU Program Priorities: Wildfire Preparedness
• Washington Fire Adapted Communities – Washington Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network
• Wildfire Resources | Department of Natural Resources
• Why are lone homes left standing after the fires? It’s not entirely luck

[00:00:00] Erin Hoover: Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb, your go-to podcast for up-to-date research-based horticulture and environmental stewardship knowledge to help you grow and manage your garden. Produced by Washington State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteers and brought to you by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

[00:00:16] I’m your host, Erin Hoover, a WSU Extension Master Gardener since 2015 and a certified permaculture designer and modern homesteader.

WSU Master Gardener volunteers are university-trained community educators who have been cultivating plants, people, and communities since 1973. Are you ready to grow? Let’s dig into today’s episode.

[00:00:53] Welcome to episode 54 of The Evergreen Thumb.

WSU Extension Master Gardener Program Priority #7: Wildfire Preparedness

My guest today is Al Murphy. Al is a WSU Extension Master Gardener in Chelan-Douglas Counties, and he’s here today to talk to us about the Wildfire Preparedness Program priority.

WSU Extension Master Gardener Program improves wildfire resilience by equipping communities with science-based education on Defensible Space creation and vegetation management.

[00:01:21] Volunteers empower individuals to implement fire-resistant landscaping practices that protect homes, reduce wildfire risks, and safeguard local ecosystems. These efforts drive behavior change with residents, adopting strategies that minimize fuel loads, enhance emergency preparedness, and mitigate environmental and economic risks.

[00:01:41] By fostering a culture of proactive wildfire prevention, the Extension Master Gardener Program creates safer, more sustainable communities, ensuring long-term resilience against increasing wildfire threats. Wildland fires pose a severe threat to homes and properties in the Wildland Urban Interface, where residences are situated near or within fire-prone areas.

[00:02:02] Studies revealed that up to 80% of homes lost to wildland fires could have been saved with proper vegetation clearance and the establishment of Defensible Space.

Strategic planning and fire-resistant landscaping are essential for minimizing the risks of fire damage. Without Defensible Space and effective vegetation management, wildfire spreads more rapidly, increasing the risk of structural damage, property loss, and threats to lives.

[00:02:26] This also results in heightened environmental destruction, greater economic costs, and reduced safety for communities. Poor landscaping practices in fire-prone areas can exacerbate and intensify wildfire spread, complicating efforts for firefighters to contain and manage the flames. Prioritizing Fire-Resistant Landscaping and preparation is vital to reducing these risks.

[00:02:50] WSU Extension Master Gardener Program Volunteers play a vital role in educating communities about wildfire risks and Fire-Resistant Landscaping. They provide guidance on creating Defensible Space, understanding fire defense zones, and identifying fire ignition sources, as well as choosing plants that help safeguard homes against wildfires.

[00:03:10] Al, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the show.

[00:03:13] Al Murphy: Well, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Guest Introduction

[00:03:16] Erin Hoover: So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work in wildfire management?

[00:03:21] Al Murphy: Sure. I am a forester, a retired forester. Uh, I worked for the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management for about 37 years.

[00:03:30] I’ve worked in almost every western state, and I probably fought fires in every western state, but, uh, have been stationed in a lot of the western states. Uh. So very much enjoyed it; just a wonderful, wonderful career. Got to see a lot of different, uh, areas, meet a lot of wonderful people, uh, and then fire be kind of, kind of became my, uh, area of expertise.

[00:03:55] And uh, so I spent a lot of time in both preventing them, and starting them, with prescribed fire. I have a lot of experience in prescribed fire, and I have a lot of experience in putting fires out. So, fire suppression, fire prevention, and prescribed fire use. I have a lot of skills and experience in each one of those areas.

How Al Got into Forestry

[00:04:16] Erin Hoover: So what drew you into working with the wildfire aspect of forestry?

[00:04:22] Al Murphy: Well, what kind of got me into forestry in the first place is kind of interesting, uh, I graduated from high school in the Chicago area. Ugh, right after that, I went to Canada. I was very excited to be a hunting and fishing guide for the rest of my life. That was my dream job: to work in the woods and deal with, uh, just a few people at a time.

[00:04:45] So I did that for a couple of years, and then my boss, just a wonderful, wonderful person, uh, told me that I need to go to college. And so, he gave me $600. Imagine that, $600, and he says, “You try it for a semester”. So I went back and, uh, I went to school, and in many ways, it’s unfortunate I never saw him again.

[00:05:07] But, uh, I continued on through college, lots of years in college, about six or seven years in college, and, uh, getting lots of edumacation if you’ll will. So I, I went out west to California. My brother had just got out of the Navy, and he was living in Northern California up near the Plumas National Forest.

[00:05:34] And uh, he, I told him that I was very interested in working in the woods. And he said, “Well, a friend of mine is a district ranger up here, and, uh why don’t we talk to him?”. So, he comes down and, uh, tells me a lot about what a forester does. I had no idea what a forester did, and he tells me about managing habitat, protecting habitat, and doing all these different things. And at that time, I didn’t even know what the habitat was.

[00:05:57] Um, so I, I had fun. So he says, “Hey, if you wanna come to work with us, uh, I’ll put you on the fire crew for the summer”. He says, “It’s gonna be a low-paying job because, uh, we got all of our other positions filled, but we can probably, uh, put you in at the, at the lowest rate”. And so I thought, great. So, that’s what started it.

[00:06:17] And I fell in love with, uh, fire. And I also learned at that time, in my opinion, there were a lot of things that could be done better, and I was gonna fix that.

Changes That Al Has Seen in How Communities Approach Wildfire Risk

[00:06:33] Erin Hoover: You said you’ve worked in management, wildfire management across the Western US, and even in some other countries, you told me. Um, what are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in how communities approach wildfire work or wildfire risk?

[00:06:47] Al Murphy: Yeah, there’s been some major, major changes. Uh, I can remember early in my career when we went to a forest fire, rarely, rarely were there homes involved.

[00:07:02] It was out in the wild. It was wildland. And then as things changed, people started moving and what have you, and we started occupying more of the wildland with homes. The whole thing kind of changed. And uh, so what I, what I saw happening is, is the wildland becoming more and more involved and, uh, things changed in that.

[00:07:26] And, and it’s interesting how the science picked up, what’s going on, what’s changing? And science became a very key thing in my life, well for, for a variety of reasons. Uh, science was very important to me. It was throughout my entire career in both high school and college. So I really paid attention to what was new, what was coming out of the research and development folks.

[00:07:51] And I saw a lot of things happening in the Wildland Urban Interface, the WUI, and we’ll probably talk about that more, but I saw a lot of neat research being done. In fact, one of the guys I went to school with, that’s where he went.

The WSU Master Gardener Program’s Wildfire Preparedness Program Priority

[00:08:05] Erin Hoover: Let’s talk for a minute about the WSU Master Gardener Program’s Wildfire Preparedness Program Priority. What’s the objective of that priority, and how does it impact how Master Gardeners interact with the public about wildfire?

[00:08:20] Al Murphy: Okay. That’s, that’s interesting. The WSU Master Gardener wildfire priority, uh, well, there are nine priorities, and you know, wildfire and wildfire losses is one of those priorities, preventing those losses, reducing those losses over time.

[00:08:37] Over time, the amount, you know the, the amount, like I said before, a lot of people are moving toward the WUI, the Wildland Urban Interface, is becoming more occupied. How’s that?

[00:08:48] Uh, if, if you’ll we’re moving further from the urban areas out to the ex-urban, out into the wildlands. And so from a WSU standpoint, the reason that’s important is to think about this, and a lot of people don’t really give a lot of thought to this, but who better than a Master Gardener to manage a micro landscape?

[00:09:11] A lot of my career, I spent managing, you know, hundreds or thousands or millions of acres, and so that’s, you know, on the macro scale. And so, Master Gardeners, their job, if you will, is to manage things on a micro scale. The term Master Gardeners, in my opinion, it’s a misnomer. I don’t have a better term, so I think we need to stick with that because a lot of people think about, when you say Master Gardener, well, you must be talking to either vegetables or flowers, right?

[00:09:42] No, you’re talking to micro landscape management, managing the soil, the water, and all those different attributes, the natural resources in a yard or an area, something that’s not huge in size, in fact, uh, a lot of times, much less than five acres in size. So that’s where I think Master Gardeners become the experts, if you will, in the idea to provide education.

[00:10:06] We’ve been through a variety of education. None of us are really experts at all these things, but some of us are experts in one particular area or one particular discipline. I happen to be pretty knowledgeable in that aspect of fire and vegetation that is flammable and what have you. So, from a Master Gardener standpoint, is they’re the people that have the opportunity to educate people, inform them if you will.

[00:10:33] So that’s the job I see Master Gardeners being able to do, share with the community the information they have about fire-resistant vegetation and how to protect your particular property, and in turn, protect the community. So if that makes sense, there’s a big job for Master Gardeners to do, to present that information to the community in such a manner that it’s well accepted and received.

Defensible Space and Home Landscapes

[00:10:59] Erin Hoover: Can you talk about the concept of Defensible Space and why that matters in a home landscape?

[00:11:05] Al Murphy: Sure. Well, Defensible Space has got a couple of definitions. To a firefighter, Defensible Space means a safe place to work from to stop a fire. To a homeowner, Defensible Space means my home is safe. Okay. That the area around my home is going to stop a fire, okay. So, it’s got two different potential connotations and meanings.

[00:11:27] That’s why one of the items that I want to introduce and make sure everybody understands is a concept called the Home Ignition Zone. That’s an area about a hundred feet around a home. We don’t always have a hundred feet around a home that we can actually do something with.

The Home Ignition Zone

But the Home Ignition Zone is a concept, and it’s taking that idea of what we normally refer to as Defensible Space and create zones, landscape zones around a home, starting right at the home, zero to five feet out from the home. The idea is to have nothing that’s burnable there, and I can talk about that more as we get into this. But first, let me explain the whole concept.

[00:12:06] Once you get beyond five feet, from five to 30 feet, have something around the home where a fire, if it does catch on fire in that area, it won’t spread from one woody vegetation to another. So, you just have an area that one plant may burn. Okay? A shrub, for example, but it’s far enough, separated enough so that it won’t catch another plant on fire.

Then, once you get beyond 30 feet from a home, the idea is to get the fire to drop to a much lower intensity. So, from 30 to 100 feet from the home, if a fire comes roaring out of it, it drops to the ground. It may burn the area, but it won’t produce enough intensity or energy to cause the home to burn.

[00:12:44] In fact, there is a scientific study that was done by a fellow named Jack Cohen. He’s the one that came up with this concept of the Home Ignition Zone, that once you stop a fire from high intensity a hundred feet from your home, the probability of it catching a home, a wooden structure on fire is less than 10%.

[00:13:07] Actually, it’s much less than that, somewhere around 5%. So you’ve got over 90% probability. If you’ve got this area, this Home Ignition Zone concept implemented around your property, you have got a very, very high probability of the home not burning. And I’ll talk about some other things that go into that also.

Common Landscaping Practices that Unintentionally Increase Wildfire Risk

[00:13:26] Erin Hoover: Okay, so what are some common landscaping practices that can unintentionally increase wildfire risk in the home landscape?

[00:13:34] Al Murphy: Oh yeah. The type of vegetation you have around a home is extremely important. For example, I mentioned that five-foot area, the idea is to have nothing in there that’s burnable.

[00:13:45] Now, the other idea is, I want a beautiful, attractive, comfortable, nice-looking landscape. I don’t want something that’s bulldozed around my home that makes it look like a stark, barren area. That’s not the concept at all.

The concept is close to the home, we have herbaceous vegetation, we have annuals and perennial, uh, flowers and vegetables, whatever type of thing, but we don’t want woody stuff around the home. Woody stuff is more apt to burn than herbaceous vegetation.

[00:14:13] Herbaceous vegetation is generally full of water, sometimes 250 to 450% moisture content in a plant. And if you think about it, since it doesn’t have wood in there, what’s holding it up is the water pressure, if you will. The internal water pressure is what is holding that plant up.

[00:14:37] And if you get them to their wilting point, they’ll fall over and drop down. Like I say, their percent moisture point is very high. Often, those plants, when they do wilt and die or mature in the late part of summer or whatever, there’s very little plant material left. So even if it does catch on fire, it’s not gonna be an intense fire. It’s gonna be very low intensity.

Firewise Gardens vs. Low-Maintenance and Drought-Tolerant Landscapes

[00:15:04] Erin Hoover: So what does it mean for a garden to be Firewise, and how does that differ from just like low-maintenance or drought-tolerant landscapes?

[00:15:12] Al Murphy: Okay. You know, let, lemme lemme just throw one thing out there. Firewise is a registered trademark term, okay.

[00:15:19] Erin Hoover: Oh, okay.  

[00:15:20] Al Murphy: So, we, I, don’t use that term so much. I use fire-resistant. Okay.

[00:15:28] In fact, it’s kind of fun. In communities, some of them call ‘em fire safe communities, Firewise communities, fire smart, fire absent, you know, lots of different terms that they use, but they’re all getting at the same thing. Fire-resistant vegetation, and fire-resistant means, you know, well, let me back up just a half a step.

[00:15:53] All plants given enough heat will burn. Okay, now, but a number of fire-resistant vegetation, it takes a lot of energy to catch them on fire. And as I explained a minute ago, with these different zones, what we’re doing is we’re taking the heat and dropping it the closer we get to a home. The probability of being able to catch that plant on fire reduces immensely.

[00:16:16] So by the time we get close to home, the probability of getting anything to burn is really low. So, the idea is to have stuff spread out and keep it so that it can’t put any intensity up against the home.

Why Arborvitae Should not be in Fire-Prone Landscapes

I still want to talk about Arborvitae; it’s probably the biggest threat to the Wildland Urban Interface. For example, if you’re familiar with some of the Sage Steppe areas, you know, in Eastern Washington and what have you, the biggest threat to the Sage Steppe is probably Cheatgrass. Okay. An annual invasive grass. Well, that’s the biggest threat to the sage steppe.

[00:17:00] And I would say that the Arborvitae is the biggest threat to a community as a plant. If there is one plant that can be destructive to a community, it’s Arborvitae. And that’s why I think we really need to be looking at alternatives. We have a brochure that is alternative shrubs that would do similar things. That Arborvitae does. You know, there’s a good reason why people use Arborvitae.

[00:17:25] It’s easy to grow. It grows. It’s fairly cheap. It doesn’t take a lot of maintenance. Actually, it does take a lot of maintenance to keep it fire resistant, but you can never get it there. So there are a number of things of why people like Arborvitae. It provides a great screen. Okay? If we were in a fire-absent environment, that’s probably, uh, an outstanding plant, but we’re in a fire-prone environment once we crossed the hundredth meridian, okay?

[00:17:55] Which is back, you know, almost, uh, Western Minnesota and North Dakota. Once we get out West, all of the states are fire-prone. By the way, let me throw out something here: a lot of people think that the Western side of the Cascades is fire-resistant. Not true at all. Not true at all. That’s a false assumption.

[00:18:18] A couple of years ago. There were more fires in Western Washington than there were in Eastern Washington. There were more homes affected by fires in Western Washington than there. Climate change has a lot to do with what I’m talking about there, and things are only gonna move in that direction where fire is becoming more of an issue and concern in Western Washington and Oregon and the whole West, uh, side of the Cascades than it ever was in the past.

[00:18:54] The fire regime has totally changed. We’re no longer into those long fire-free intervals. The way it used to be before many of the Europeans got here, fires burned every 400 to 600 years, but they burned a million acres at a whack.

[00:19:17] Okay, well, now we’ve got a lot more people running around, and bless their hearts. We’ve all have good intentions, but we do activities that inadvertently cause fires. We have a lot more homes than there were back in, um, uh, the 12s or whatever. And so the opportunity for loss is increased, and the risk of a fire has elevated a bunch. So, the Western side of the state is not at all immune from fire.

It’s probably a bigger risk in many cases than the East Side.

[00:19:48] Erin Hoover: We’ve seen a lot more fires, and I’m in southwest Washington between Olympia and Centralia, and we actually had a natural wildlife refuge area recently. Scatter Creek is, it’s been several years now, but that was a huge fire, and it, um, destroyed almost the whole area ‘cause it was just a big prairie, you know, it came from the woods and then ran through the prairie.

[00:20:12] And, uh, that was state-managed land. But it was prairie, so you wouldn’t have thought that it was, you know, would go that quickly. But it was a really hot, dry summer that year, and it was just, nothing was green.

Climate Change’s Role in Weather Extremes

[00:20:24] Al Murphy: Right. And, that’s the thing is see, climate change is doing a couple of things that are, well, doing a lot of things, but one thing that it is doing is moving us from extremes.

[00:20:36] Okay. So, on the west side, it used to be between, say, 65 and 80 degrees during the summer. Okay, well, now it’s dropping down to maybe 40 and going up to a hundred. So, the average is still about the same, but the extremes are much, much greater.

The other thing is, is that rainfall warm water, the ocean, is where most of our rain, you know, if you remember from high school or uh, grade school, the, the hydrologic, the, the rain cycle, if you will, is it starts in the ocean and comes through the west side and hits the cascades and all that kind of good thing.

[00:21:11] Well, what happens? There’s more moisture produced by the warm air coming off the ocean, and so we get these deluges. I think we’ve all seen that. We get, we’ll either have a pattern or a period of no rain whatsoever, and then when we do get rain, we get a big deluge.

[00:21:35] Okay, well, those big deluges do not do us a great deal of favor. What happens is that most soil, so this is kind of a generalization here, but most soils can only soak up so much water before it starts to run off, okay? And so if we start dropping water at a rate faster than about half an inch per hour, most of that water is lost.

[00:22:01] So we, we don’t get the absorption that we do. It runs through the stream, you know, and down to the river, out, back, out to the ocean. So we don’t get the percolate, you know the, the penetration of that moisture into the soil that we used to get with the slow, steady rain. You know, we used to call it the wet side, you know, not the west side, the wet side.

[00:22:22] Erin Hoover: The wet side, definitely. Yeah.

[00:22:23] Al Murphy: So it, it is, you know, and, and we used to make teases about, oh, it’s just a Portland mist. Well, you missed Portland and hit Seattle or, or whatever. Something to that effect. And so it’s the idea of this climate change. It’s a big deal from our standpoint because we’re getting these extremes in, in temperature and precipitation.

The Wildland Urban Interface

[00:22:47] Erin Hoover: Can you tell us more about the wild urban interface and why it’s kind of the most important, I guess it’s kind of the front of protecting homes from wildfire?

[00:22:58] Al Murphy: Sure. You know, the Wildland Urban Interface, often called the WUI, pronounced “wooey”, presents an interesting challenge. If you think about it, the wildland agencies, the Washington Department of Natural Resources, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife, all the wildland agencies, they’re used to fighting fire to stop the spread of a fire.

[00:23:24] Right? You know, perimeter control is what we call it. The idea is to keep the fire small. And by the way, most fires are kept small. In fact, 98% of all fires are less than an acre in size. We never hear about ‘em, you know, so that’s what the wildland agencies were trained and taught to do, you know, perimeter control.

[00:23:47] What about the city fire departments? What’s their job? That’s to put out a fire generally inside of a house. Right? So we have an area that’s kind of strange when we have a wildland fire going into an area where there are a lot of houses. The WUI. So, it’s becoming an area of increased concern.

[00:24:09] So we have got to learn to work collaboratively, which I think is, in most cases is working very fine. But the, the strange part about this, with wildland fires, an agency has a responsibility to manage their land appropriately. And if you think about it in the WUI, the Wildland Urban Interface, the only person that has authority or responsibility to do anything around a house is the homeowner, whoever owns the land.

[00:24:39]. The agencies, all they can do is enact legislation, you know, laws, and maybe some enforcement of those laws and, and some education, ok? Those are the things the agencies can do, but action has to come from within, from the homeowner. So, we often are dealing with a situation that we have very little control over once a fire starts.

[00:25:03] That’s what makes it challenging. That’s what makes it so lethal, if you will. The potential for loss of life is so high, and the potential for economic loss is so high. Once one home catches on fire, it becomes just an ember cast, a machine, a factory of producing embers. It’s like taking a shotgun and firing it up in the air, and those pellets start landing everywhere, generally in the direction the wind is blowing.

[00:25:31] And so it creates another fire, and in many cases, it creates many, many fires. Most fires don’t move like a wall of water. A lot of us think fire moves like a, just like a flood, just a steady wall of water. It doesn’t really move that way; they don’t move that way.

[00:25:54] They move where there’s fuel and the right kind of conditions, so those embers are cast off and land and, and ignite only where there’s a good opportunity for it to catch fire. When it lands in burnable debris, it’ll catch fire and start to spread again. So now we’ve got multiple fires burning, and it becomes very challenging to do the perimeter control and protect the houses at the same time.

[00:26:23] It’s really very challenging.

[00:26:27] Erin Hoover: It’s funny you mentioned that. Um, the fire I talked about earlier, I think it was the same fire. There were actually embers that crossed I-5,

[00:26:35] Al Murphy: mm-hmm.

[00:26:36] Erin Hoover: And, uh, landed in a, they were like a commercial composting and soil operation, and so it had plenty of fuel once that crossed the freeway, and they were lucky they were able to contain it within the property of that business um, and it didn’t spread, you know, into the nearby houses.

[00:26:54] Al Murphy: Yeah.

[00:26:55] Erin Hoover: So a lot of people don’t realize that those embers can cross a half a mile of pavement.

[00:27:00] Al Murphy: Well, you’re familiar with Lake Chelan, aren’t you? Well, um, a couple of years ago, when we were managing a fire, uh, we had many, many embers cross Lake Chelan and start new fires from the south shore over to the north shore of Lake Chelan.

[00:27:17] Okay? And so that became a real threat. The same thing is true, uh, in fact, let me give you an example of a fire just, just a couple of years ago. Some homes were burning in Wenatchee, in the northern part of Wenatchee. The, the homes caught on fire. They had shake roofs, by the way, at the time, so it was very unfortunate.

[00:27:37] But they caused enough embers that they caught the recycling center on fire down by the river, and it caught that area on fire. So it caught the cardboard on fire. They blew across the, uh, Columbia River and were landing in the, uh, the parking lot of one of the local grocery stores, Fred Meyers, and and, uh, people were putting out pieces of cardboard that were still flaming when they landed on the other side of the Columbia.

[00:28:09] So think about that. It’s playing hopscotch, is what the fire is doing. It’s not, like I say, it’s not moving like a steady wall of water, it’s moving, like playing hopscotch.

Simple Steps to Start Protecting Your Home from Wildfires

[00:28:19] Erin Hoover: Yeah. Wow. If someone’s just starting to think about wildfire preparedness and how to protect their home, what are a couple of simple first steps that they can do to mitigate that?

[00:28:30] Al Murphy: Well, there are several things, and in fact, I’ll make it really simple. Three terms. Three words: lean, clean, and green. Okay. That, that is probably the easiest to remember, and I can define those somewhat.

Lean is that we don’t want a lot of woody vegetation in the immediate vicinity of the home. We want those at least more than five feet away from the home, but we want them far enough apart that if one catches on fire, the radiant energy, you know, the, uh, radiant, like a campfire, it’s far enough away that it won’t catch another piece of woody vegetation on fire. So, we want it lean, so we want it spread out.

[00:29:04] Okay? We want it clean. We don’t want any dead vegetation, uh, around the home. You know, we don’t want all the old dead bark or the dead grass, leaves all piled up somewhere, or a pile of firewood up close to the house. So we want it clean.

[00:29:26] We don’t want dead stuff lying around, and we want it green. And when I say green, we want just enough moisture content in the vegetation immediately around the home so that it takes a lot of energy to drive that moisture off in order to catch that vegetation on fire. So lean, clean, and green.

[00:29:48] That’s the easiest thing to remember. And each one of those does a wonderful job. And if we have that area 30 feet around the perimeter of a home in a lean, clean, and green fashion, we have an extremely high probability of a home surviving.

Alternatives for Organic Mulches in the Five-foot Range Around Homes

[00:30:06] Erin Hoover: So, this just brought up a thought of, um, using organic mulches, then within that five-foot range would probably not be a good idea.

[00:30:18] Al Murphy: That’s a no.

Okay. Slap your hands. Don’t, don’t put mulch there. I have no problem with organic mulch, but you want it away from the home. I would offer you an alternative. Okay. And in many cases, uh, it’s called Scoria. It’s red cinder. Okay. Some people call it lava rock and what have you.

[00:30:39] And what it does is it holds the moisture in the soil quite well; it keeps the temperature low in the soil; it doesn’t blow away; it does provide some long-term fertilization to the soil, and it’s fire-resistant. Cats don’t use it for their litter box. Uh, that’s six of them that I got off the top of my head. I should have written that down.

[00:31:02] So anyway, that’s a great alternative to woody mulch up against the house. I mean, you can use other ones. There are lots of pretty different rocks and, and I think, you know, pretty rocks in the landscape do a wonderful job. They can become a fuel break, a barrier for the fire to spread, if you will.

[00:31:24] If you have got dead grass, okay, and you have a rock path around the house, they can break up that spread and become a barrier. So, rock is a good thing to have in a landscape, and it doesn’t need mowing.

[00:31:40] Erin Hoover: Yeah.

[00:31:40] Al Murphy: They don’t wear out.

How a Fire-Prone Yard Affects the Homes Around It

[00:31:44] Erin Hoover: That’s a plus. I think we kind of talked about this a little bit with the Arborvitae, but how does the condition of one yard affect the surrounding homes when it comes to welfare?

[00:31:53] Al Murphy: Okay. In nature, there’s a, uh, a long time ago, a guy named Barry Commoner said, there are four rules, four laws of ecology. You can’t do just one thing, everything goes somewhere, nature knows best, and there’s no free lunch. That’s ecology by, uh, a fellow named Barry Commoner.

[00:32:22] Uh, so if your yard is susceptible to fire, it’s going to cause a problem for the next-door neighbor and right on down the line. So like I say, you can’t do just one thing. The idea is to collectively, and this oftentimes is why it’s a good idea to create Firewise communities, if you will, like, or fire safe, whatever you wanna call them, but communities that collectively do something to reduce the probability of the area burning.

[00:32:43] Okay. There are some examples that were just completed here in the Wenatchee area, where we’re doing some vegetation work just outside of the neighborhood, reducing the amount of sagebrush moving up into some of the homes. And so we reduce the density of the sagebrush and make it less fire-prone, so it burns with much less intensity.

[00:33:04] So if one yard catches on fire, then it’s kind of, we’re off to the races. And that’s why I was talking about the embers. Remember that 70 to 90% of all homes are ignited embers, the ones that burn. So it’s a big deal. Yeah.

Experiences that Have Shaped How Al Thinks About People and Fires

[00:33:21] Erin Hoover: So, what is one experience from your career that really shaped your thinking about how people interact with the natural environment during the fire season?

[00:33:29] Al Murphy: A couple of things come to mind right off the bat. Some of ‘em are pretty bizarre. Let me offer that there has been a lot more than just one thing that has affected my career. I hope that I have been observant and have pulled something from lots of things.

[00:33:43] I’m learning something from you right now, you know? And every time I’m around somebody, I learn something. And when you’re green, you’re growing, and when you’re ripe, you’re rotting, you know? So I want to stay green and always learn something new. But a couple of things that kind of jump out at me are I remember on a fire down in Southern California when I was, um, much younger.

[00:34:10] I saw a woman running down the road, and the only thing she had was a quart of milk, and the fire was coming into the community, and I thought, oh my gosh, you know, she’s scared to death and doesn’t know what to do. She’s running down the street, and I’m with a crew, a 20-person crew. We’re going up the street towards the fire, and then she’s running past us.

[00:34:35] And I thought, oh boy, boy, that left an impression on me as far as being prepared, thinking about it. Don’t panic, you know, those types of things, get out in time. Lots of words came to my mind when I saw this woman.

Another circumstance, I spent 13 years as the district ranger at Chelan, okay, on the Wenatchee Forest. I’m not at all opposed to harvesting timber, but I’m opposed to harvesting big trees and Ponderosa pine. Okay.

[00:35:04] So I think we should be harvesting the smaller stuff and what have you. We proposed a timber sale in this area, and this woman was really opposed to it, and she didn’t think we should cut any trees out of the National Forest. Well, I’m of the opinion that the more we take the smaller midsize trees out, the more fire resilient it becomes, not fire resistant, but fire resilient.

[00:35:27] So if a fire does go through the area, it doesn’t hurt anything. Actually, it becomes beneficial. Well, this particular person was not at all in favor of harvesting trees. Okay. So there was a fire, and it came down through her area, and I had a crew. We sent the crew out there, and we thinned out around her home.

[00:35:48] Her home was not fire safe at all, and so we thinned out around the home to take suppression actions on that, and we saved her home. Okay. So after the fire was out and everything’s all said and done, I went back to talk to her and kind of talked to her about why we cut these trees down to save her home.

[00:36:06] And I thought, oh, we’re gonna get into a debate here and, uh, so I’m, I’m prepared to get chewed on. So, I drive up and I park in her driveway and I start walking towards her house and she comes running out of the house with her arms open and gives me a great big hug and says “Al, you were right”. And I remember that. Okay.

[00:36:31] That’s one I remember. And that was a big deal. That was a big deal. And, you know, so I, I felt very good. That’s something I remember, and people are ill-informed. Okay. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory or negative way that I know something that she didn’t know, okay, that we can save her house if we do this action around her house and remove this flammable vegetation.

[00:37:00] And we did. And we saved her home. And so anyway, it was; that was an interesting, uh, operation.

[00:37:08] Erin Hoover: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s what sometimes people forget. They don’t know what they don’t know.

[00:37:12] Al Murphy: Exactly.

[00:37:13] Erin Hoover: And uh, that’s kind of one of my favorite sayings ‘cause we’re, I mean, especially as Master Gardeners, we’re always learning, there’s always more to learn, and we have to be open to that and receptive to it.

[00:37:25] Al Murphy: Well, if I can, if I can build on that, Erin, one of the things that, that I learned, um, fresh out of college. Okay. I got a job on the Bridger-Teton National Forest out of Jackson, Wyoming. And it was interesting because at the time I got out of college, I’d been gonna college for quite a few years, uh, and there I was the smartest person in the world. Okay. Just ask me. Okay.

[00:37:48] Because at that point, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and then I found out later on in my career, I knew what I knew. I was pretty good. I was, I was a professional. Okay? And then the third stage of my career, I finally got to the point where I became, uh, out of Washington, DC, I was the lead for a lot of the fire program for the BLM.

[00:38:13] And somebody asked me a question, and I said, “Gosh, I don’t know, I don’t know the answer”. She says, “Well, Al, you’re the expert”. I said, “Yes, but I know what, I don’t know. I know a lot of stuff, but I don’t know everything”. So those are the three phases. You don’t know what you don’t know, you know what you know, and then you finally get to the stage where you actually become pretty close to an expert. You know what you don’t know.

[00:38:40] Erin Hoover: So you shared the Arborvitae publication. Is that on the Chelan-Douglas website?

[00:38:46] Al Murphy: Yes. In fact, we have three different publications on there. Another one, just a little publication that’s nice and short, an easy one that you know about fire resistant vegetation for, this happens to say Douglas, but it’s, it’s pretty much all of Washington. And then we have a book…

[00:39:04] Erin Hoover: Fire Resistant Plants for Eastern Washington. I think there’s a Western Washington version as well.

[00:39:08] Al Murphy: I just got done writing it.

Erin Hoover: Oh, there you go.

[00:39:13] Al Murphy: Yes, I worked with the DNR and we put together a, uh, fire-resistant vegetation book. I don’t have a copy right here, but, uh, and those are all on the Chelan-Douglas Master Gardener Website.

[00:39:27] Erin Hoover: Okay. We’ll make sure to link to that so people can access those. And, um, alright. Are there any final thoughts you’d like to add about wildfire preparedness?

Final Thoughts about Wildfire Preparedness

[00:39:35] Al Murphy: Well, just a couple of things that I would like to make sure that everybody kind of keeps in mind is the idea of being fire-resistant landscaping. A lot of people will jump into action following a fire. Okay. There’s a lot of action in the year and then the two years following a fire in an area.

[00:40:00] The third year, now I, I know this from our professional experience in going around the, uh, all the 11 western states following wildland fire. People are very interested in grants. That was one of the things I did. I provided grants for communities, uh, following and before fires. So people were very interested for about a year or two following a fire.

[00:40:24] So what I have judged from that fear of fire is not a motivator because once the threat is gone, it is no longer a motivator. Okay? However, having something beautiful and comfortable that you love is a motivator. So if we create a landscape around our home that makes us feel safe, comfortable, and we enjoy it, we’ll maintain it, we’ll do a good job of it.

[00:40:59] But I want to throw another thing out here. You know, there is a thing called perfection, okay? Which is not achievable. And so if people shoot for perfection, having exactly the right plants in the right spot and everything, we’re never gonna get there. Excellent result and excellence is the best you can do with the effort, the time, the money, whatever resources that you have.

[00:41:27] So we want to shoot for excellence, not for perfection. Okay. If we try to shoot for perfection, we’re gonna give up, and we’re not gonna get there. To create a landscape that you like, that makes you feel good, so that if there is a fire in the neighboring area, you don’t feel like you have to run right away, because I know I’m in a safe environment. I’m comfortable. That is what keeps people motivated when it’s something they love they like. Does that make sense?

[00:41:57] Erin Hoover: Definitely. Yeah. Actually, it’s funny because just this weekend someone said to me, Perfection is the enemy of good enough. And so it’s funny that that same thought came through while we were talking about this.

[00:42:10] So you do what you can with what you have, right? And you work to improve it and make it better.

[00:42:17] Al Murphy: Yeah. I’m not suggesting being sleazy about the way you go about it.

Erin Hoover: Oh no.

Al Murphy: You put your best effort into it, but that’s the best I can do.

Final Thoughts

[00:42:27] Erin Hoover: All right. Any other final thoughts?

[00:42:29] Al Murphy: No, I think that probably was enough off script.

[00:42:33] Erin Hoover: Well, thank you so much for being here today. This was a great conversation.

[00:42:37] Al Murphy: Well, good is I enjoyed it and I hope, uh, hope it was worthwhile.

[00:42:42] Erin Hoover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, brought to you by the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteers and sponsored by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

[00:42:53] We hope that today’s discussion has inspired and equipped you with valuable insights to nurture your garden.

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