Biochar - agrichar - terra pretta

[223coyote]

did anyone experiment this year with any of these ?
i did an experiment with carrots , i planted 1 raised bed normal soil , 1 month later i planted more carrots in another raised bed with biochar added and then twice i put compost tea on it and a month later the bed with the biochar had caught up to the other bed , and i ended up getting two crops of carrots in wisconsin out of the same bed in one season , when i harvested the carrots out of the biochar bed they were much bigger than the carrots planted a month earlier ,  needless to say i was pretty impressed , i'll be doing more experiments with biochar this year . jim

[Graybeard]

Biochar - agrichar - terra pretta     

I have absolutely no clue what either of those are.  Care to elaborate? 

[223coyote]

here's a video clip on biochar.
http://vodpod.com/watch/592067-the-secret-of-el-dorado-clip

here is a video showing how to make it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXMUmby8PpU

here's how i did mine .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEGmP6dhW5c&feature=related

here is some reading info .
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4522
jim

[Graybeard]

Even tho I have highspeed cable internet I can't get any of those links to open. I've tried each several times and waited several minutes on the first but had nothing to show for it but a blank page so I ask again. What are they?

[223coyote]

bio char is a type of charcoal that is much more porous than regular charcoal , and it is excellent habitat for all the benificial bacteria in the soil , the bacteria hold the nutrients in the soil [ they won't allow water to drain out the nutrients ] the benificial bacteria when they die give the plants the nutrients in a more usable form that they can absorb .
jim

[Graybeard]

OK I've come back to it now at a later time and got all four to load this time. Is that you making the charcoal in the one you say is how you do it?

I guess I'm not yet sold that charcoal is better than compost but might give it a try. I do add what's left of the charcoal from my charcoal smoking/cooking to the compost pile or my garden areas already but have never tried adding charcoal as a soil amendment.

[223coyote]

greybeard , I mix the charcoal with the compost , so that all the beneficial organisms can live in the pores of the charcoal , i wouldn't use regular charcoal from your grill , unless your sure there has been no chemicals added to it when it was made , most charcoal is no good for this , i heard people say that cowboy brand hardwood charcoal was alright to use . But i would only do a small section the first year to se how it works for you .
jim

[Graybeard]

Been doing it for years. I've heard all the usual "I think it might be bad" warnings but see no basis for them. Geez it's charcoal and anything added gets burned up in the process. If it was bad or unsafe then it wouldn't be safe to cook with. It's a rather tiny part of the larger whole anyway.

My compost bins are all 4'x4'x3' tall. A pan of burned charcoal added a few times a year sure don't figure very heavily in the larger picture of it.

[223coyote]

greybeard are you talking of adding the ash fom the charcoal or the charcoal itself ? if you use like kingsford ,etc. you will not have the porous structure that you need for holding nutients in the soil , the char i made was alot more porous than any charcoal iv'e seen offered comercially for barbeque . when you make the charcoal and deprive it of air it gets very porous.
jim

[Graybeard]

I understand that what I'm doing isn't the same. Yes I add the ash and any unburned charcoal left after I smoke meats in my Brinkman Gourmet Smoker to my compost bins or some times directly into the soil of my many garden areas. We have far more flower gardens than veggie gardens here.

If you have a virtually infinite supply of wood for both fuel and charcoal I suppose that other than being rather time intensive it's not that expensive to do what you are talking about. I do not have an unlimited supply of free wood however. I'd be lucky if I could muster enough to do one or two barrels a year using free wood. I'm certainly not going to buy wood to do it.

Personally I believe I'll gain more value by chipping and composting the wood I have rather than burning it for charcoal. Mostly what I generate each year is brush and young saplings cut back from areas they try to take over that I don't really want them in. I don't own enough acreage to just indiscriminately cut wood for the process and have no outside free sources.

[bilmac]

I'm thinking that ashes left after you grill are just that, ashes not really charcoal. I'm also thinking that ash added to southern soils that has been leached by years and years of lots of moisture would be a good thing if it isn't overdone.

Here in the west where we have very little natural moisture, we normally have too many minerals in our soil and adding more would be not good.

[Bob Riebe]

I do not know if any of you grow roses, but I have several gardens, and new roses prefer new ground; so on occasions, no set pattern, I remove several wheelbarrows of dirt from the rose garden and move it to either the lawn or vegetable garden.

For the roses I put in bagged soil, or garden soil that I have mulched heavily in recent years, as that garden soil is still fairly light.

Any way, where ever I put the rose soil, has a huge benefit for the area covered.
I had spots, large, in the lawn that refused to grow grass, beyond quack grass.
I had tried roto-tilling and seeding, bagged soil, and even one year spent hours on my hands and knees vacuuming the pine needles with a shop vac.

Two years ago, I was moving roses to a new garden and took some of the soil out of the old one and spread it over the grass devil spots deep enough it also covered what ever was growing there, put some seed down and waited for the latest attempt to fail.
The grass grew, stayed, some times grass would grow, and be dead by the end of the summer, and now I have lawn without nasty bare spots.
Bob