Advice wanted on using a Weber kettle bbq to burn plant cuttings

[Guylian]

I have some plant cuttings that are not suitable to be composted due to size, thorns and/or disease, and I want to burn them so that I can use the ash in the garden instead of putting them in my weekly landfill bin. I thought about buying a metal bin or building a small firepit to burn them in, when it occurred to me that the Weber kettle bbq I've already got might work just fine instead. Has anyone tried this already, or could tell me not to due to potential damage to the kettle?

[eco4560]

Welcome Guylian!

Hire a chipper and turn them into mulch instead. If they are diseased then either 1. soak them in water for a few weeks or 2. solarise them in black plastic.
Whether you burn them on your BBQ or send them to land fill you are using fossil fuels and losing a resource.

[Pakanohida]

Welcome Guylian!

Hire a chipper and turn them into mulch instead. If they are diseased then either 1. soak them in water for a few weeks or 2. solarise them in black plastic.
Whether you burn them on your BBQ or send them to land fill you are using fossil fuels and losing a resource.

I deal with incredibly invasive blackberry on a daily basis and I would never use my webber for this. I totally agree with Eco, and more so about solarizing.

The second way to deal with them is to have goats eat them up, and then pull the roots, or have pigs eat the roots. Much more effective then any chemical or anything else we got going for ourselves.

[sweetpea]

I have berry cuttings and poison oak cuttings, ivy, that I don't trust to die alone, and I cram them into a silver garbage can with a lid and put it in the sun for a couple weeks, and it bakes them to death.

It seems like the Weber would be a bit shallow to get a real fire going in there. I have cut down my berry cuttings into kindling-sized pieces and they start a fire like you wouldn't believe, once dry. I can't imagine they would burn any hotter than lump charcoal, but you don't want lump charcoal ashes going into your garden soil. When I was a kid we had a burn barrel in back, an old oil barrel with a few small holes punched in the bottom, set up on bricks, with a screen lid, and things could burn inside there without the flames getting outside the barrel and threatening anything around it, or blowing flaming ashes over to other flammable things. You'd need some kind of screen over the Weber, and if you kept adding pieces, you'd need to be sure the burning ashes didn't get away and smoulder something nearby.

[Pakanohida]

Do not ever burn poison ivy, poison oak, or the other one. Growing up, a friends father accidentally inhaled the fumes from burning poison ivy. He was rushed to the hospital and was in misery for a very long time.