Creating Defensible Space

So our house is in the WUI in Mill Valley. We are quite literally surrounded by trees. It's also an old house, with cedar shake siding and lots of redwood decking. There's a lot we need to do to get this place fire hardened and we don't have too much budget right now so we'll take it step by step and start with simply cleaning up our easterly lot line. Our neighbors have agreed to split the cost of the clearing work as long as I organize it. So I did and had two laborers come and help and we got busy clearing a 10-12' fire break just outside my fence line. Where before I had highly flammable Broom and, overgrown Pampas bushes pushing through the fence, now it looks like this.

The End Result from Outside

The work wasn't so difficult either. With basic gardening tools we were able to pull out the weeds, the Broom and a dozen dead branches fallen over the last decade.

We also have a very large and very flammable Bay Tree at the top of the hill. If a fire were to jump into the canopy there that could turn an emergency into a catastrophe in seconds. So I was particularly careful removing all the ladder fuel weeds from underneath and limbing the tree up as far as I could reach, about 10' over natural grade.

That way it's a lot less likely a surface fire will "ladder up" into the canopy. Cleaning up your property is often the first step to wildfire resilience and here in Mill Valley, particularly in the hills, we are living in a forest. Trees and shrubs are everywhere, many of them overgrown and untended for years, if not decades. So there's a lot of work just like this to do on your property probably just like mine. Homestead Valley makes it easy for us to take advantage of the debris box program, which is what we did. Through Homestead Valley Safety Committee community members can order and fill a large debris container fro MV refuse and fill it with landscape and other wood waste and they will haul it away free of charge. The end result is check that risk off the list... a little piece of mind

End Result from Inside