The New Fire Pit

After living in our "new" house for more than four years, and two summers after constructing the rock wall for our garden it was finally time to complete the fire pit. An original hole was dug at the time we built the wall, two years would pas before the hole would be used for anything but a watery lake for Mitchell to play in. Aug. 1 was the big day. I woke up and got right to placing blocks, leveling, moving blocks, re-leveling, re-moving blocks until it was done. Right around lunch time, my description of the project was: "It's not perfectly done, it's barely even well done, but it is done."

That night, Paul Josten brought Jonathan, Michael and Mariah over to officially put the fire pit to work with a batch of S'mores. Julie Anderson came over, as did Chris McNabb and his son Gavin. Tristan McNabb also made it over to cook up a S'more for herself.

Like I said, the new fire pit isn't absolutely perfect, but it does make tasty S'mores.


Checking to see that the fire pit is the same height as the existing rock wall. The fire pit itself is pretty level, although the ground around it needs some work and makes it appear uneven.


With the massive iron bowl in place. Note that the brickwork has a bit of an oval shape that allows some of the gray stonework to show... Yeah, that's why it's not perfectly round.


The fire pit goes nicely with the rock wall we built more than two years ago. You can see that the raspberries and blueberries have grown nicely during the meantime. Now we just need to beauty bark the rest of the upper area... or will we use crushed gravel? Or a walking path? Or a patch of soft lawn?


In fact, the blueberry bushes are heavy with fruit right now. Mmmmm... Blueberry milkshake anyone?


Mitchell's green bean plants also are growing and should be producing healthy snacks in no time. His carrot plants in the background still seem a little small, but we'll see how they fare in a few weeks.


The tomato plants are sure yielding plenty of healthy red tomatoes right now.


By evening it was time to start roasting marshmallows. The group on hand as we lit the official first fire in the new fire pit included, from left, Julie Anderson, Chris McNabb and son Gavin, me, Michael Josten and dad Paul. Jonathan and Mariah were not ready to be in the photo.


Gavin (above) carefully cooks a pair of marshmallows, while Jonathan (below) prefers a more Cajun "blackened" approach.


All in all, I think everyone agreed the first S'more cookout with the fire pit was a success, and surely won't be the last!

Back to Mitchell's Homepage