We burn a lot of brush and tree limbs around my fifteen acres, and there's nothing quite like a quart of diesel to help get the fire goin'. My wife calls it "hamburger helper".
A cautionary tale: Ordinarily you have to work pretty hard at hurting yourself with diesel around an open flame, but it can be done under the proper conditions. We were introduced to the joys of diesel as a fire-starter by Doug, the good-ole-boy backhoe operator we hired years ago to tear down some nasty old out-buildings on my land (Doug's the one who taught us to call it 'hamburger helper'). This being the backwoods of SW Pennsylvania, evverbody just burns their construction debris (Californians, eat your hearts out), so Doug dug a big-ole hole, then used his tractor to knock a wood-frame building into the hole, then threw some hamburger helper on and lit her up. She burned pretty good for a while, but then went out, so ole Doug just threw on another coffee can full of diesel. Nothing happened, so he threw on another can. Nada. Then another can (if you're counting, there's about 2 gallons of diesel in that hole now). About thirty seconds later there was an explosion powerful enough to knock down a couple of nearby trees, and a ball of flame that took all the hair off of ole Doug's head. "Wow" he said (once he could speak again), "it ain't never done THAT before!" The problem, of course, was that all that diesel he was throwing onto the hot embers was evaporating and building up in the bottom of that deep hole, until it finally reached the flash-point concentration, and then it exploded. Don't do that.
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