Homemade Bio-Char

[chrysanthemum]

I’m excited for you, heavyhitterokra! You’ve done a lot of hard work and preparation, and I think you’ll reap rewards for years to come.

I was thinking of you yesterday as I was sifting out little tiny coals from our ash can.. They had been sitting for a while, so they were cold. I just sifted through the ashes before putting them in our larger trash can and took the coals to my compost. It’s nothing compared to your operation, but I figure it’s a resource I have that would otherwise go to waste, so I’ll use it.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

Every little bit helps. Every flood starts with a single drop of rain.  All those small steps add up over the years, keep up the good work.

In the offseason for grilling, I've found that both Atwood's and Lowes sells Cowboy brand hardwood lump charcoal fairly cheap.  Lowe's has it advertised $13.98 per 15 pound bag.  Atwood's has it advertised $14.99 per 20 bag, so that's not a bad price at all, considering how much effort it takes to make 20 pounds of your own stuff.  Not to mention how hard it would be to make your own charcoal if you lived in town or in a dry place where abundant dead wood was not available. 

[heavyhitterokra]

I've been experimenting today. I bought a twenty-pound bag of Cowboy Brand, lump charcoal from Atwood's for $14.99 to make a small batch of biochar.

The 20-pound bags are made of heavy plastic, sort of like a dog food sack, so I've been able to crush the charcoal inside the bag by running over the bag repeatedly with the truck. I've been well pleased by the way the plastic has been holding up. (You can't do things like that with a paper charcoal sack).

When I'm finished crushing the bag of charcoal, I'll pour it into 5-gallon buckets and begin the inoculation process. For the amount of charcoal I ended up with, I think the price I paid was well worth it. I've run out of small dead wood to burn, so I thought I'd try this method, just to see if it was comparable.


That's a fair amount of charcoal for the price, $14.99 per bag at Atwood's.

The heavy plastic stood up well to repeated runs under the back tire of my truck.  I was pleased with the results.

[chrysanthemum]

Wow, heavyhitterokra. That’s some tough plastic. I have read of people using lump charcoal to create biochar, but I don’t recall any pictures of the pulverizing process. Your photos gave me a chuckle.

I really don’t see us getting into making our own biochar in a retort the way that you do, so I appreciate your giving information for those who can’t really produce their own in an outside burn. Our climate is so dry, and we spend a lot of time under burn bans. We use the wood on our land all the way down to about an inch and a half in our woodstove, and we chip the branches for mulch instead of leaving them as brush (though we aren’t as quick as we should be at times). We don’t want to leave them too long, though, because of wildfire danger and snake habitats near where the kids play. We have had an occasional fire in an outdoor burn pit as a family activity, and the kids enjoy that, but even that is a rarity. Even our woodstove season is probably drawing to a close here, but I’ll sort out a few more bits of charcoal in the coming weeks to add to the compost bin.

I’m really interested in hearing your observations with your biochar endeavors, though. Thanks for making this thread.

[heavyhitterokra]

That twenty-pound bag of charcoal was more than I could fit into one 5-gallon bucket. It filled two buckets about half-full of crushed charcoal, so that was a decent amount, being how you only mix the finished product at a 1:10 ratio with topsoil. 10% biochar and 90% topsoil means that one 5-gallon bucket of charcoal, once inoculated and aged into biochar will make way more than 50 gallons of garden goodies. I think this will turn out to be a good experiment, especially if it helps someone in an environment not conducive to openly burning brush.

Sometimes, when doing things like trying to make compost from only kitchen scraps, it feels like one is wasting time and effort, due to the small amounts being produced, but with this twenty-pound batch of charcoal, plus an equal amount of kitchen scraps and a little manure, it feels like I'll end up with a significant amount of the finished product to make it well worth the time and effort spent in making it.

[chrysanthemum]

You’ve sure planted an idea in my head, heavyhitterokra. I had to make a trip to the grocery store yesterday, and I saw lump charcoal in the aisle. I didn’t buy it, but I would never even have noticed it without your posting about it.

My husband and I are talking about making some biochar to put around some of our in-ground trees to help with water retention since we have so many times of drought. We have some pails of weed tea that we think we could use in place of manure to inoculate the charcoal. I’ve read that sandy soils like ours really benefit from biochar for water in addition to nutrients.

[heavyhitterokra]

Biochar is an interesting subject to study. Supposedly, charcoal has the ability to absorb 5 times its weight in water.  There seems to be an almost endless supply of reading material about making and using biochar.  I don't think it's a thing one could learn everything about in only a few hours of research. I've enjoyed looking into it and learning more every day.  I really am curious as to its effectiveness in the garden.

[heavyhitterokra]

I crushed up another twenty pounds of charcoal today, to add to my biochar pile. I've hauled in fourteen loads of cow manure with my little red wagon with sideboards, a wheelbarrow load of chicken litter from the henhouse, and a big tub full of rabbit pellets and urine from my wife's rabbit hutch.

I turned the entire heap yesterday and added 10 pounds of all-purpose flour and two gallons of feed store molasses, for the microbial support. It's finally beginning to look like I might eventually have enough to top dress all twelve of my 150' foot rows the day I raise my beds sometime in April or early May. Hopefully, by then, the charcoal will be fully charged.

Apologies for the dimly lit photos, it was starting to get dark by the time I was done.
All tarped up and ready for the snow.  I know it doesn't look like much out there in the middle of my 25,000 square foot garden, but there are about 1,500 pounds of goodies and hard work rolled up in that tarp.

I started out today, just tilling in a few rows of cow manure, then, ended up tilling almost the whole thing.  I figured I'd better do what I could before it gets too muddy to do anything later.  Bandit, our little house dog has to inspect all of my work.  You can barely see him out there giving it the final 'sniff test.'

I got froze out before I finished.  It was 66 degrees out there today and I didn't have on a coat when the wind changed, bringing in tomorrow's snowstorm.  I guess almost done is better than not started at all.  This is Sunny, our German shepherd, probably wondering why I called it quits before I was done with the job.  Cold weather doesn't seem to bother him.  (He has on a better coat than the one I left at the house today).

[macmex]

Wow! You have been really WORKING on this! Hope it makes a big difference.

It sure did cold fast yesterday. I went from wearing a tee shirt to a mid weight winter coat in about an hour.

[heavyhitterokra]

This is a photo of what my garden looked like this morning, after the snow fell on my biochar pile. It turned off cold really fast!

This photo was taken from the same spot as the first photo in the series that I posted yesterday.  If you look closely, you can see the orange colored 5-gallon bucket, and the blue bucket, and the handle of the wheelbarrow that are all near the folded edges of the tarp that I covered the biochar with before I came inside last night.
What a change from yesterday!  I'm sure glad I'm not a wild animal, living outside during these crazy swings in the weather.  this morning, I fed the wild birds the last of the 75 pounds of sunflower seeds that I had to last them all winter.  I hope Spring comes soon!

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks for pointing out the buckets and wheelbarrow.  I felt that it was a victory when I spotted the pile of buried tarp after that.

I agree about the crazy weather.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever experienced “normal” weather since I moved to Texas.  Every season seems to have some anomaly in it, but I don’t think I’ve experienced a winter like this one before here.  Sure there are ups and downs, but the changes this year have been so drastic.  I just realized that I haven’t covered my artichoke this time around because I was focusing on potatoes and blueberries.  I think it will have to take its chances at this point.

[heavyhitterokra]

For some crazy reason, I got busy and forgot to post on here that I gathered up my biochar and got it all spread on my garden a few weeks ago and covered it with Plasticulture so that it doesn't get leached away by heavy rains. Good thing I did. I think it has rained about a foot since I got that project finished.

I ended up with about 1,000 to 1,500 pounds of the finished product. (Just my best guess, being how it has rained so much that guessing gets pretty tough to do lately).

I spread half a row with a top dressing of biochar and half a row without any as a control to compare the two later.

I also spread a full row right beside a row without any, as another control and another easy side-by-side comparison.

I worked the biochar in with a tiller on a few rows to see which method does best.

I also tilled in a couple of rows with just plain barnyard manure and rotted hay to see if that did any better or any worse than biochar. If the biochar turns out to be worth the effort, I'll probably make more of it as the years go by. If not, I'll pursue other avenues in years to come.

Here are few photos:


This is biochar being spread along on the first row, before being tilled in with the tractor.

Just a closeup to see how thick it was spread.

This row was done half with plain soil, and half treated with a top dressing of biochar before being covered with black Plasticulture.

This is the last of the biochar being shoveled out of the tarp that I had it charging inside of for the past few months.  I spread it one load at a time with a shovel and a little reds wagon.

This is the biochar being spread along one of the rows using a short shovel.

Just a photo of half the row with and half without.

The finished product.  Twelve rows treated in various ways, for comparison this coming season.

[rdback]

heavyhitterokra Ron, I found myself reading about terra preta and it reminded me of this thread. I thought you might enjoy the read (or not lol).

terra preta info

[heavyhitterokra]

rdback,
That was very interesting reading. I enjoyed that.  I'm just inside the house, taking a break from planting for a few minutes, and took the time to start reading the article you posted, to rest my back before I fix some lunch and go back out there.

The fact that the Terra Preta in the article was said to have covered 2,400 to 7,300 square miles, reminds me of how things were done when I was a kid, back in the early '60s.

Back then, people didn't have all of the weed killer and heavy equipment that they do now for controlling brush or keeping ticks in check. Back then, people burned the entire landscape every Spring at just about the same time of the year, year in, year out.  I remember helping my grandparents set their 40 acres on fire several times through the years. They didn't have a tractor or a brush hog, so setting fires was how they kept their pastures clean. Then, after the fire, while the dry manure was still smoldering, they'd have all of us grandkids line up to walk in parallel, using grubbing hoes, axes, picks, and shovels, to hack out persimmon sprouts and wild rose bushes as we went along.  Any rocks that we found along the way were thrown on the back of the truck to be stacked off away from the pasture.

We lived on land adjacent to Fort Gibson Lake, so there were thousands of acres of Corps of engineer's land surrounding us on every hillside for miles and miles. People leased that land for hay meadows, so they needed to be kept clean. Usually, in late March or early April, we'd spot smoke billowing from an adjacent hillside and someone would say, "Must be about time to burn."

My grand parents would make few phone calls to gather the kids and the grand kids, then, everyone would burn their land at about the same time. The time they picked, depended on two things, it was warm enough for ticks to be active, so the fire would kill them, and it was very close to time for the green grass to pop up from the heavy thatch after the fire had passed.

All of those years of burning probably left tell-tale signs of charcoal around there for several miles. Since that is a practice no longer in use, it will probably become a mystery within a few decades of now, just how those pieces of charcoal got there. They are probably in a single layer, laid down over a 100 year period after the land was settled here in Northeast Oklahoma, but before the advent of 'bored' volunteer fire departments, whose members tended to stomp out every fire they could find burning as if it were some kind of National Emergency, beginning in the late 1970s.


Of course, in doing so, they have now created a thick covering of heavy underbrush that was not there before, so any fire set nowadays has a very good potential to become a wildfire. Things back in the day were done for a very good reason. The way we do things nowadays is not always the best practice, but I don't know if anyone will ever figure that out?

All that to say, I can see how a cultural practice like that, repeated for centuries, possibly for millennia, could have created a carpet of 'biochar' or Terra Preta that would become several feet thick over time.

Back then, it was common belief that residue from fire improved the pasture.  We didn't have scientific evidence of that, we could just see that where the fires had been, the grass was always greener.  I do know one thing for sure.  Back then, a guy could ride a horse anywhere for miles around, because the underbrush was not so thick that you couldn't get through it.  It's certainly not that way anymore. 

[chrysanthemum]

I don’t have any kind of experience with the kind of intentional burns you experienced at your grandparents’ farm, heavyhitterokra, but I’ve read that it was common practice here in Texas for the Native Americans to burn the brush to rejuvenate the prairies.  There is a species of tree here called “Texas Cedar” or “Mountain Cedar,” though its real name is Ashe Juniper, I believe.  It has taken over so much land that it’s considered an invasive species even though it is native.  Apparently the reason it has invaded so much land is that it used to be controlled by fire.  The large oaks would survive the quick burns, but the small cedars would not.  

We have some thistles that need pulling, and we like to rot them down and make “weed tea” for the garden.  I’m tempted to get a bag of charcoal and inoculate it and work it in as I can around my fruit trees.  I need to do more research on pH, though, because I don’t need to do any raising of the pH around here, and I need to talk to my husband to see if he would be on board with buying charcoal.