Biochar

[ESBkevin]

Birchar needs to be charged with soil life to provide real benefits rather than absorbing them from the target soil. Compost tea soak helps. Or mix the charcoal into the compost bin as it all breaks down. Mixed results seem to be the way here in the UK. If you had really really poor soil then we'll charged biochar will defiantly have a good effect. In most UK top soil regular composting and mulch will have a better effect both short and long term.

[GYOMalcolm]

@kevin I agree about "charging", which is trying to say the same thing as "add goodness to a biochar soil". Bokashi would be as good as compost, or better if you count all the energy lost from conventional composting.

I don't agree about your "composting and mulch ... better ... long term". The whole point of biochar is that it stays in the soil, decade after decade, without loss. No other soil amendment comes close on that score. It isn't food, it is structure. The structure holds on to water and soil food like nothing else. So "biochar WITH composting and mulch" does give you better long term results. HTH.

[Thelma Sanders]

So "biochar WITH composting and mulch" does give you better long term results. HTH.

How long have you been using Biochar, to be so convinced of its worth over decades?

[GYOMalcolm]

Thank you for your kindness.

I first met biochar when I was researching antidotes to climate change. I even had a rather well-received peer reviewed paper published: "Black carbon sequestration as an alternative to bioenergy" which you can read at the OU, if you can stay awake.

But there is one good bit in it. Biochar became popular following studies of the Terra Preta soil of Amazonia. This is commonly said to be the most fertile soil in the world, certainly on that scale. It was created by the pre-Columbian peoples, and has in fact stayed fertile without maintenance since before the Spanish Conquest. Which means over 6 centuries at least but more likely millennia.

Since I wrote that we are now fairly certain that it was created by the day-to-day waste disposal system of what was then a sophisticated civilisation, more populous than today, and probably as much agricultural as rainforest. Two parts of the system were (a) lactic fermentation of waste, including poo and (b) incorporation of charcoal, possibly only from cooking fires or possibly deliberately integrated with (a) because charcoal is a great odour absorber. Today, (a) is called bokashi and (b) is called biochar.

Given the history, I firmly believe that one should ideally not use bokashi without biochar, and vice versa. The biochar gives the soil permanent structure and retention of water and nutrients (among other benefits for non-growers). The bokashi gives highly efficient and hygienic conversion of organic waste into soil food, but without the biochar it will leach and erode away just like any other soil amendment

As I said in another post, I am currently struggling to find a way to source enough biochar at reasonable cost. Traditional charcoal burning is an appalling polluter. Modern charcoal making in a retort is clean but rather too high-tech for individual gardeners. The way forward is an intermediate technology based on the wood gas stoves of campers and mountaineers, slightly scaled up. The best I can do at the moment is quench an incinerator halfway through the burn and extract the char.

So I rely mainly on others to do the research. Edinburgh Uni has the UK Biochar Research Centre.

[veggiechicken]

Malcolm, you have clearly researched this at depth and have the advantage over most of us.
However, in my opinion, wherever there has been an extended period of human habitation, soil changes will occur. Cooking fires, human waste, bones and so forth lead to changes in the soil. You see these layers during archaeological excavations. This is little different to us ordinary gardeners adding wood ash, manure and composted waste to our gardens.

The cost of buying commercial biochar and bokashi bran doesn't sit well with me. I support the basic principle of keeping and using whatever I find on my own piece of ground. Bring nothing in, send nothing out.

You have your views and I have mine, and we are entitled to them. You won't convince me that your methods are more beneficial than mine.

[GYOMalcolm]

VC, the costs don't sit well with me either. I mentioned the biochar above. I'm sure if our local allotments had a clean wood gas burner we'd both be queuing up with our prunings. (That one is for Carbon Gold, who should be looking to design and sell 100,000 of them IMO). If it were cheap, it's a no-brainer whichever soil food you use.

I am currently trying to test whether bokashi actually needs the bran, or whether one of the many internet DIY alternatives do just as good a job. I really don't see what the non-lactic organisms in the bran bring to the party.

Our gardening beliefs are religious. If I tell you that a typical compost set-up, be it aerobic or anaerobic, loses to air 50-(70?)% of its input carbon bonds - and therefore of the energy that can reach the soil - you won't believe me; nor will you believe that bokashi loses none. I'm OK with that. What you lose, BTW, is CO2 and CH4, so yours may be a clandestine illegal activity in 20 years time. Dead of night and all that. :-)

People who might be converted already have wormeries. Bokashi is worm food, once it has a few days to oxidise. Since the soil worms then go for it like crazy, I do wonder what are the advantages of a separate wormery. Is there a post that rehearses the advantages?

[veggiechicken]

I've tried wormeries but generate so little food waste that there was nothing to feed the worms with!
Any waste here is fed to the dogs or chickens. The chooks are my compost bin. All the green waste from the garden goes into one of their runs and they either eat or shred it. I rake it out, stack it and use it on the garden.
Garden waste has to be composted in some way. There's too much for a little bin, so its the chickens or chop and drop mulching for me. The only on-cost is my time.
Forests will always be mulched by falling leaves and decaying vegetation, the bodies and poo of forest animals. I hope this won't be deemed an illegal activity in years to come!

[Dynamo]

I've just seen this video on YouTube. It doesn't look too difficult to make but I'm not really sure how much smoke it would make.

https://youtu.be/O-R-8OPRJz4