Homemade Bio-Char

[heavyhitterokra]

I have been reading about Bio-Char, since about 2011; because of its porosity, it harbors many beneficial bacteria for the betterment of your soil's health.  The very nature of Bio-Char makes it a kind of Super-Compost-Booster.  If you attempt to purchase Bio-Char already made, it will cost you anywhere between $200 to $400 per cubic yard.

That seems ridiculous to me, when for less than $20.00 you can build your own kiln to make it perpetually in your own back yard.

Note: (It's important to know though, that charcoal on its own will act like a 'sponge' absorbing and robbing your soil of nutrients if it is not charged with lots of beneficial bacteria and nutrients before being added to your garden). So don't just add plain charcoal to your soil in hopes of improving anything. Biochar is a product of months of inoculation and 'fermentation' and is added to garden soils only after a lengthy curing, aging, process.


This is a link to a really straight forward and easy to understand, instructional video about making your own charcoal for Bio-Char at home.  Bio-Char made from hardwoods can also be used in your charcoal grill, smoker, or for fueling the wood stove inside your house, which has the potential of becoming a heat source as well as a good gardening amendment.  

 

Happy charring.

[rdback]

Great post. Since I love to grill and run a smoker, I've been thinking about trying this more and more.

[heavyhitterokra]

If I could find a place to purchase a 30 gallon drum with a tight fitting lid, I'd already be making this stuff at home.  My local feed store sells the 55-gallon drums with tight lids, but the 30-gallon size is hard to find.

[heavyhitterokra]

Not being able to find a 30-gallon drum has not stopped me from making my own bio-char. I just built one of a different design than the one shown in the video.

If making your own bio-char, be sure to study up on the use of it a little bit before applying any of it to your garden. Due to the absorbing nature of charcoal, uncharged bio-char will suck up nutrients from your garden's soil rather than discharging the nutrients that your garden needs.

Bio-char is easy to charge.  It acts sort of like a sponge.  You just crush it up in an open container, then add the goodies you want it to absorb, such as rabbit litter, chicken litter, goat droppings, urea, compost, manure tea, etc. Add a little water and let it ferment for about a month. 

Bio-char will absorb those goodies and hold them in storage indefinitely.  When applied to your garden, the nutrients will be held in storage for your plants to use during lean times.  Bio-char has a very airy, open, lattice-like micro-structure, similar to a micro-apartment building for all kinds of good things to live inside of. 

When your plant's roots reach the bio-char, it's like 'money in the Bank' in the form of stored nutrients that were absorbed during the month-long charging process.  


 This is a photo of my homemade bio-char inside a 55-gallon barrel just before I crushed it in preparation for charging with rainwater, chicken litter, urea, top soil, and compost.



 Image courtesy of:  www.kindness2.com/secret-of-eldorado.html

This is the design I used.  I just used my cutting torch to burn a few small holes in one side of a 55-gallon barrel, as shown in this illustration.  Then filled it to the brim with seasoned wood scraps, clamped the lid on tightly, laid the barrel on the ground (holes facing downward) spaced it off the ground by placing a 6" inch diameter log under each end, and kindled a fire underneath it.

Once the fire underneath it was hot enough, the barrel began smoking.  It took about two hours for the steam to cook off, before the smoke inside the barrel became volatile.  Once the smoke emitting from the holes became volatile, they lit on fire, producing a 'blowtorch' effect.  It It took about 6 hours for the 'blow torch' gasses to burn off.  I kept a wood fire burning below the barrel during the entire process.  It was a good way to spend the night in my campground out back, keeping me warm, while producing something useful on the farm.

Once the blow torch gasses stopped burning, I knew the wood inside was charred all the way through and I was able to roll the barrel off the fire.  (I could tell by the sound and much lighter weight that it was no longer just wood scraps).  I placed the holes in the barrel, facing the ground and smothered the air from the contents by shoveling soil all around the edges of the barrel. 


I left the soil in place to allow the barrel to cool overnight, then stood the 'cool to the touch' barrel on its end the next morning and opened it.  (Be careful when opening a freshly burned barrel as the contents have the potential to cause spontaneous ignition before water is applied).  

Once the barrel was opened, I applied water to keep the dust particles down and began crushing the charcoal in preparation for charging it with composted soil, some green plant matter, a little topsoil, and some chicken litter.

I'll let this sit for about 30 days, then apply it at a rate of 2 cups per square foot and mix it in to my soil about 6" to 8" inches deep.

[heavyhitterokra]

Here are a few photos of the process.
 A few air holes for gas to escape during the char process.  (These are the holes where volatile gasses flare off, creating the blowtorch affect).

 It would be much wiser to kindle the fire after the barrel is in place.  (Live and learn).

 Some of the scraps I used as fuel to char the contents of the barrel.  These are also the wood scraps I placed inside the barrel to be charred. 

 This was a really nice way to spend the evening, roasting biochar while enjoying the warmth of a good fire in our campsite.  If you look closely, you can see the logs I used as spacers to kindle the fire below the barrel.  The spacers allowed me to add more wood underneath the barrel as it burned for the next 6 hours.



 This photo was taken next morning; it shows the dirt that I had shoveled all around the barrel the night before, to smother the charcoal inside.  This was after I had rolled the very hot barrel off the fire at the end of 6 hours of burn-time, to let it cool over-night.

 The finished product, before crushing it to add charging materials.

 These are two of the barrels of biochar after crushing and charging the contents with water from my goose pond.  I added chicken litter, topsoil, a little compost, some green plant matter, and anything I thought my okra plants might enjoy. They are sitting in my garden as the contents ferment over the next 30-days.  After it stops raining, I'll shovel the contents into plastic tubs to ferment.  I had planned to make more, but the rains have put me on hold for a few more days.

[raf]

I was fixing to make a post about roti and saw this (I wasn't sure where to put the roti post at & thought this might be the most appropriate place.
Getting to the point I've had good success charging biochar while using it to control odors, wetness etc. in the animal pens.
I put it under the rabbit pens, under the chicken roost & where the goats spend most of their time When it's "charged" it will grow mycelium (at least where I charge it) not sure what fungus it is but the char gets a white haze over it & once you get below the surface you can find mycelium threads. One drawback to the way I do it is it can be pretty hot. I compost the char that I feel is too hot or spread it thinly.
It helps tremendously in keeping the animal areas more sanitary and captures more of the nitrogen (urine). If I can I try to stack uses/functions/work, the Mrs. says it's laziness but I tell her it's being efficient lol.

[theozarkan]

I can't wait to try this. I watched several videos on making biochare last year and wanted to built a retort but never got around to it. The method above seems much simpler.

[heavyhitterokra]

I'm currently building a retort with a side door to load and recover the inner chamber of charcoal from my bio-char maker. I was not able to find a 30-gallon barrel to make the inner chamber, that goes inside the 55-gallon barrel retort, so I made the inner chamber from an old 40-gallon hot water tank instead.   I cut it off to the legnth I needed, then, I made a lid for it by cutting down on old 55-gallon barrel lid to go over it. I welded rebar handles on each side for lifting purposes, but the old tank proved very heavy once loaded with wood and that was very restrictive in its use as a top loader. For that reason, I cut a side door with hinges, so I could open the 55-gallon barrel and step right inside the retort with the inner container in my arms.

I've yet to find the time to use it yet.  It has been too windy here for several days to chance firing it up.  I'm looking forward to giving it a try.  I think it will work much better than my first design, which seemed to burn more fuel to heat the drum above the flames, than there was wood inside for the production of charcoal.  Hopefully, this one will prove to be more efficient.

I'll try to snap a few photos once I've cooked my first batch from this new, improved design.

[heavyhitterokra]

I've been cooking biochar again, during the cold winter months, just to kind of keep in shape and to keep things going in my garden as well. I have about three acres of timber around my house, so this is a really good way to clean up the deadfall and keep the underbrush down.
This is a 55-gallon barrel loaded and ready to go onto the fire.

This is the same 55-gallon barrel after a 6 hour burn.  The wood inside has shrunk by a little over 1/3 and has been turned to charcoal.

This is how I fire my barrels.  

I also use the dead plants that I clean out of my garden as fuel to heat the biochar barrels.

Double wheeled wheelbarrow to the rescue again.  This thing can carry some serious weight one-handed and can handle some very long logs!

[heavyhitterokra]

This is a video of how to make biochar on a smaller scale. This guy makes his biochar 5 gallons at a time (which would be much easier than the way I've been making my biochar) but we both get the same results.

[heavyhitterokra]

The best Biochar video I've seen so far.



I like his burn method better than mine too.  (I'm gonna have to buy another 55-gallon barrel with no holes in it, just to try this method).

[chrysanthemum]

I occasionally take some cooled coals from my ash bucket and toss them in my working compost bins. The ash itself either fills in holes in our property or goes in the trash. We’re so alkaline here that we avoid using it much.

I’m impressed with your system for making lots of biochar.

[heavyhitterokra]

I enjoy the biochar-making process. It keeps me busy on cold winter days when I'd otherwise be sitting on the couch, wishing for warmer weather. I just build a fire under my barrel, pull up a lawn chair, and proceed to spend the entire afternoon gathering sticks, branches, old logs, and feeding wood into the flames. This keeps me warm and helps clean up our woods.  When mowing season rolls around, there's not much worse than bouncing the blades of the mower across an old dead log buried in the tall grass. For the first time in several years, I've managed to pick up all of the deadfall and have actually done something productive with it.

I used to sit out there and roast hotdogs, but a person gets kind of tired of roasting hotdogs every day. The biochar provides me with a goal that is very hard to achieve an end to, keeping me busy for days on end. Creating the charcoal is just the first step in a very long process that takes around 60 to 90 days to complete, so this is a long-term project with a lot of good benefits.

I only use 10% charcoal in my final mix, so 55-gallons of charcoal equals 550 gallons of compost mix when I'm done next Spring.  I mix it with chicken litter, topsoil, dead leaves, straw, dried molasses, cow manure, rabbit manure, and grass clippings or green weeds that I pull in early Spring.  It takes lots of work, but it's the kind of work that is relaxing and enjoyable to do.  Lots of sunshine and happy bird songs.  Plus, the exercise this time of year is really good for you.

[heavyhitterokra]

Today, I burned dead sticks in an open-top 55-gallon barrel, as shown in the latest video above. (It took several wheelbarrow loads of sticks broken up small enough not to stand on end when I dropped them in).

It took most of the day to burn enough wood to fill the barrel brim full to the top with charcoal. A 55-gallon barrel holds 7.5 cubic feet of charcoal. One cubic foot weighs about 19 pounds. Atwoods sells lump charcoal in 20-pound bags for $14.99 each. So according to those prices, I made about $112.00 worth of charcoal today.

When the burn was complete, I poured about 25 gallons of water in the barrel and put a tight fitting lid on it. Tomorrow morning, I'll go back out there and dump out the water to prepare to start crushing the charcoal, then I'll inoculate it.

In all honesty, I believe a person could just purchase a 20-pound bag of lump charcoal from the hardware store and crush it down to make the very same thing as I have been making here all week long. (It sure would be a lot faster!) Of course, that would not solve the deadfall timber problem that got completely cleaned up this week as a result of my making homemade charcoal instead of buying it already made.  So I kind of killed two birds with one stone and have an aching back to prove it.  Sometimes, I think I might be getting too old for some of this stuff.  Days like today sure make me glad I'm not cutting firewood for a living anymore. 

After cooking down a 55-gallon barrel full in one day, I envy the guy with the brick kiln who only makes 5-gallons of it at a time.  55-gallons was a bit of a long day.

[heavyhitterokra]

The incredibly high surface area to volume ratio of charcoal lends that substance certain properties, and ultimately those properties are what make charcoal so perfect for the creation of biochar. Charcoal is highly porous (all those old xylem and phloem tubes in the plant tissue are now re-opened, following pyrolysis) that incredibly high surface area is capable of absorbing up to five times its own weight in water, as well as any nutrients dissolved in that water. Charcoal integrated into soils helps to buffer moisture swings, creating more stable growing conditions and thus healthier plant life.

Today, I was able to finish adding inoculates to my pile of crushed charcoal; about 500 pounds of cow manure, about 50 pounds of chicken litter, about 5 pounds of flour, about a gallon of feed store molasses, and a pound or so of rock powder. I wrapped all that up in a big tarp as if it were a giant bundle of laundry and left it to ferment until planting season.

Sometime around March 1st, it ought to be ready to fork and turn over. Sometime around April, it ought to be ready to apply to my seedbeds. At last, I feel like the hours, days, and weeks of preparation are finally about to pay off. I can hardly wait until planting season to see what becomes of it all! I would be lying if I said I was not excited at the prospect of adding this new amendment to my garden.