To pulverize my charcoal ( I use store bought pure hardwood BBQ grilling charcoal - no chemical additives), I put it in plastic "burlap" sacks and immerse in manure tea for a month to charge it. To crush it, I put my old Kemp shredder on a large tarp and loosely tie it up around the shredder, then pass the wet charcoal through that to break it up quite fine. Works well, and no dust.
This was quenched too soon. If yellow flames are still burning away then you still have volatile organics being released. You should only quench once the flames have died down and ash is visible on the top layer. Otherwise you'll be introducing creosote and worse VOCs to your soil, inhibiting soil life and negating any benefit you hope to achieve. Composting or ageing it reduces VOCs (although they inhibit the composting process). You'll have greater internal surface area if you just let it burn a little longer before quenching. There are too many people doing this wrong and temporarily poisoning their soil.
@@MaxSwedenAgroforestry yeah, I agree I think that’s overstated, unless a large portion of your soil is made up of the bio char. There isn’t gonna be any poisoning happening lol.
@@MaxSwedenAgroforestry probably very slowly and without converting all the wood into charcoal or eventually what we consider biochar. Some of it will be just ash, which is also good for soil, but more in the short term rather than long term like charcoal/biochar
Richard, thank you as always for sharing and inspiring! Please keep your turkey and duck enterprises going if you can, as I find them to be wonderful workers on the farm. I don't know if you have ticks but my turkeys have reduced my tick population to nearly zero in just two years, and ticks are a scary health problem here with Lyme desease and Rocky Mountain Fever. May not apply in Sweden though.
I cover my pit with wet grass clippings and leave a few areas of smoke, roughly the size of cigars smoking, then top it with an old satellite dish, it starves the fire of oxygen and means at least an overnight burn is necessary, it is an attempt to emulate the charcoal burners from the iron age, sometimes I leave it upto three days burning. I found that I get a lot more char for my wood.
I had fresh cow milk every summer I spent at my grandpa's farm until high school and hard to go back to the grocery store milk after return to my parents city home. Thanks for the teaching, Biochar so much to learn as grandpa didn't just farm but was a coal miner and long hours.
really informative, thanks. you said how much biochar was needed for market garden but I was wondering how many beds that batch of biochar you did in video would cover?
The main idea is to heat the ground up to charcoal temperature. You should have dug holes into the bottom, to allow faster hotter combustion. This reduces wood needed, heats faster, burns cleaner. Especially if you force feed air, like a forge. The you push embers to the sides, put raw WET/WETTED wood in the center, then cover with soil. As with any charcoal processing, the idea is to BAKE the wood in an O2 free environment.
Cool, thanks for the video. I was wondering how I could cheaply crush the charcoal I plan on creating. Driving over it within a tarp seems like it works well. I've got some unused wooden fence posts left in my garage by the last owner of my house as well, so maybe I'll lay those over the top to more evenly distribute the weight as well instead of the weight just being concentrated under the tires.
Richard, I created a design for a flat sided kon tiki type biochar kiln that is plasma cut from a mild steel sheet, then welded up, with a plumbing fitting on the bottom for quench water management, and tiltable using welded on structural tube. It is designed to have all of the flat parts cut from a single sheet of 60" x 120" sheet. Would you be interested in analyzing that design?
Last time I did charcoal I made the mistake of not adding enough water. Looked like I put it all out but nope, came back later and lost a bunch of it to ash since it was still very active. I had to put a TON of water on it. I usually do long trough type v shape pits since I have long branches and waste construction wood and such. Thanks for another video :)
Blackcurrants are high in pectin - using apple concentrate with them to jam would be a mistake. Also - consider blackcurrant jelly instead of jam. Lot less work prepping the currants
John Harrison did few hundreds kilos of jelly with just Russian tomato mousse machine connected to 1kw motor, sells like crazy and needs almost no effort but there are still some people's prefer jam even on higher price just because it has texture, I prefer jelly due to its concentrated taste :)
I have a papermill close by that uses wood chips to power a boiler. The chips don't burn completely up and is basically charcoal. Would you utilize this free resource?
Shaun White Are you completly sure that they are not burning other stuff in the boiler as well? For instance primary and secondary sludge, coal amongst other fuels.
Shaun White perhaps also check if they are using stuff like fertilizer or ammonia to reduce NOx, I am not sure what it ends up as after it's been through 800 degrees celsius, it all ends up either through the chimney or in the ashes. Sorry if I come across as negative, that is not my intent. I just want you to know the potential problems/issues there could be since you probably are going to eat the stuff you grow in it. But as I said, I'm not sure that there even is a problem at all.
nick notepad sucks cause its another blody item you need to cary around.... Hands i other place one will most likelly have to cary with him anyway so why not to put them in to more uses? Think holistic :p
Thanks Richard. If you build a cone of kindling wood and then light a fire at the top of it. This will help convert the initial fire into charcoal in a similar way to Top Lit Updraft gassifying Stove . Best wishes Rod
I burn brush and tree trimings , after it burns down I put it out with water, no special pit, then rake out the charcoal, is there any difference in the end product? other than I know a lot of it does turn to ash there's too much to worry about
In CapeTown, SAfrica🇿🇦I want to know if one can burn the wood of alien vegetation "port jackson & blue-gum trees" to make biochar? Thank you for the video & sharing your knowledge. Stephen D 🦋🐞🐝☀️🌦🌈🌠
Richard I had a question for you. We have access to large amounts of wood chips here. I’ve used your method to make pit char before but I’m wondering if we could smolder burn a large pile of wood chips into biochar- could you give me any feed back on this thought.
The surface area of a piece of charcoal is immense and can hold more bacteria/water etc than the equivalent volume of soil. I get that. All good. What I'm less clear on, is what is the value of going through all that when all the the bacteria, fungi and so on that are of direct benefit to a growing plant are the ones occupying sites along the roots, root hairs etc? They are the ones exchanging sugars and doing all that good stuff - the ones chilling out in their fancy char hotel off in the soil somewhere are a bit pointless aren't they? Why not just add them directly with your compost/extract/tea? This is the point that mystifies me a bit about biochar. Happy for someone to explain it to me but I have chatted with Elaine Ingham about this as well and she seemed to feel similarly. Maybe there's something I'm (we're) not getting here. Clearly it does no harm, (and I'm not being negative!) I'm just genuinely interested to understand the benefit of all that work when adding/boosting biology and/or carbon into soil can be achieved in simpler ways. Keep up all the good work! :)
As far as I understand it, the "fancy char hotel" is what gets the microbes through times where there is not much food available. We all know, that bacteria can reproduce in almost no time, so when the food offer is huge, I wouldn't be concerned about the few microbes, that are chilling out. There will be more than enough of them, to do the "dirty work" we want them to do.. ;-) When things get tough though, they have a save haven from which they can start in force when times get better. So it's more about keeping a solid base alive all the time.
The terra preta of South America and the black earth in Africa have conserved nutrients (and water) for centuries. As I understand it, nitrogen volatilizes very quickly, many minerals are 'washed' out of the soil by rain, etc., and organic material decomposes quite rapidly.... needing constant replenishment. If you have a constant supply, fine, but if not, conserving it with biochar might be extremely helpful. I think the historical picture tells the story.
you are adding too much wood in one hit (too many hands;). You should add more regularly with less wood... leave a little longer... aim for NO smoke production.
i'm looking for some good biochar, and found this info about the internal surface area: "Biochar is created through a non-combusting thermal destructive distillation of biomass in an oxygen free environment. This makes for a Biochar with exceptional internal surface area, much more active than charcoal made by smouldering combustion." would you agree that using the cone pit method leads to inferior biochar?
The whole point of the cone design is to deny oxygen from being sucked into the bottom, which it does. Whether you think it's "inferior" to biochar made with machines costing thousands of dollars is very subjective; what we need are scientific studies done comparing the different methods and closely examining the pore structure and composition as well as testing it in the field so we can compare the effectiveness. I'm sure there is marketing hype at play so we just need the actual data and comparisons. The question for you is, if you could make biochar in a pit for essentially free, what % effectiveness are you willing for it to be compared to mass-produced char made in a complete vacuum, which costs a lot?
What you want it the white amber, that's the sign of a complete combustion, your biochar was full of unburned wood, which you want to avoid. also you should try to use scrap wood like cuttings and so on, and not chop trees to make charcoal, though in Sweden the wood is plentiful so, not a big deal.
I'm curious if you have any concerns about human pathogens in the urine? Maybe use the urine at the start of the hot composting process so it has a chance to deal with those deadly pathogens. Soak your char in worm castings/quality aged compost instead maybe. All the best mate, love your farm.
I´d qualify your take on milk a bit. Saying that something is completely bad or completely good is mostly oversimplification. Grass fed, well kept animal products in small quantities (!) can be useful. And yes, they are historically a relativly big part of the reason why humans can thrive in climates that do not produce a lot of directly-edible food year-round (savannas, northern climates with harsh winters, high mountains and so on). That however does not mean that "milk is great for your bones" or you should consume anywhere close to the modern western diets amount of those products. Grass fed or factory farmed. A good shorthand for the question "how good is that for me to eat" is to ask "how natural is the behaviour that leads to me eating it". That puts at least a warning sign to animal products (less so for meat), because approaching large animals with horns, living in herds, and trying to get at their essential nutrition, is a recipie for getting yourself killed as a primitive human. We clearly found ways to do that, but those are rather recent adaptions (lactase) and very obviously not the food that we evolved to eat. I know, the relativly short and ad-hoc videos are not a great place for detailed discussions (of topics you did not plan to discuss) , so know that i mean no offense by adding a bit more elaboration and nuance to the topic. Thanks for the video.
Sorry to say, but that is not biochar. It is a combination of ash and incomplete combusted wood. To make biochar you need to heat to wood so it releases its gases in a chamber where oxygen is very limited. If the wood changes to ash you did something wrong. The gases are later ignited to keep the wood hot enough to continue to give all gases until nothing but a carbon skeleton results. The pH can be set by controlling the temperature at which the wood releases the gases. Rj - Beyond Harvest Veganistas
You don’t need to do all this nonsense you can just put the wood right in the soil it does the exact same thing breaks down the same at the exact same amount of carbon you weren’t transforming the carbon into any state you’re just burning off all the flammables
That’s not true. Charcoal is a stable substance and can take 1000 years to break down, not so with wood buried in the earth. You don’t get the same water retention or soil compaction resistance that char can offer if your soil needs it.
To pulverize my charcoal ( I use store bought pure hardwood BBQ grilling charcoal - no chemical additives), I put it in plastic "burlap" sacks and immerse in manure tea for a month to charge it. To crush it, I put my old Kemp shredder on a large tarp and loosely tie it up around the shredder, then pass the wet charcoal through that to break it up quite fine. Works well, and no dust.
This was quenched too soon. If yellow flames are still burning away then you still have volatile organics being released. You should only quench once the flames have died down and ash is visible on the top layer. Otherwise you'll be introducing creosote and worse VOCs to your soil, inhibiting soil life and negating any benefit you hope to achieve. Composting or ageing it reduces VOCs (although they inhibit the composting process). You'll have greater internal surface area if you just let it burn a little longer before quenching. There are too many people doing this wrong and temporarily poisoning their soil.
How does nature do it?
@@MaxSwedenAgroforestry yeah, I agree I think that’s overstated, unless a large portion of your soil is made up of the bio char. There isn’t gonna be any poisoning happening lol.
@@MaxSwedenAgroforestrynature doesn't have gardens or fields
@@MaxSwedenAgroforestry probably very slowly and without converting all the wood into charcoal or eventually what we consider biochar. Some of it will be just ash, which is also good for soil, but more in the short term rather than long term like charcoal/biochar
Richard, thank you as always for sharing and inspiring! Please keep your turkey and duck enterprises going if you can, as I find them to be wonderful workers on the farm. I don't know if you have ticks but my turkeys have reduced my tick population to nearly zero in just two years, and ticks are a scary health problem here with Lyme desease and Rocky Mountain Fever. May not apply in Sweden though.
Richard what the heck! We did our pdc together and I'm so glad you've gone so very far! LOVE TO YOU!!!
I cover my pit with wet grass clippings and leave a few areas of smoke, roughly the size of cigars smoking, then top it with an old satellite dish, it starves the fire of oxygen and means at least an overnight burn is necessary, it is an attempt to emulate the charcoal burners from the iron age, sometimes I leave it upto three days burning. I found that I get a lot more char for my wood.
I had fresh cow milk every summer I spent at my grandpa's farm until high school and hard to go back to the grocery store milk after return to my parents city home.
Thanks for the teaching,
Biochar so much to learn as grandpa didn't just farm but was a coal miner and long hours.
really informative, thanks. you said how much biochar was needed for market garden but I was wondering how many beds that batch of biochar you did in video would cover?
The main idea is to heat the ground up to charcoal temperature. You should have dug holes into the bottom, to allow faster hotter combustion. This reduces wood needed, heats faster, burns cleaner. Especially if you force feed air, like a forge.
The you push embers to the sides, put raw WET/WETTED wood in the center, then cover with soil.
As with any charcoal processing, the idea is to BAKE the wood in an O2 free environment.
Cool, thanks for the video. I was wondering how I could cheaply crush the charcoal I plan on creating. Driving over it within a tarp seems like it works well.
I've got some unused wooden fence posts left in my garage by the last owner of my house as well, so maybe I'll lay those over the top to more evenly distribute the weight as well instead of the weight just being concentrated under the tires.
Richard, I created a design for a flat sided kon tiki type biochar kiln that is plasma cut from a mild steel sheet, then welded up, with a plumbing fitting on the bottom for quench water management, and tiltable using welded on structural tube. It is designed to have all of the flat parts cut from a single sheet of 60" x 120" sheet. Would you be interested in analyzing that design?
We all would!
Last time I did charcoal I made the mistake of not adding enough water. Looked like I put it all out but nope, came back later and lost a bunch of it to ash since it was still very active. I had to put a TON of water on it. I usually do long trough type v shape pits since I have long branches and waste construction wood and such. Thanks for another video :)
Blackcurrants are high in pectin - using apple concentrate with them to jam would be a mistake. Also - consider blackcurrant jelly instead of jam. Lot less work prepping the currants
John Harrison did few hundreds kilos of jelly with just Russian tomato mousse machine connected to 1kw motor, sells like crazy and needs almost no effort but there are still some people's prefer jam even on higher price just because it has texture, I prefer jelly due to its concentrated taste :)
Excellent video - thanks!
Haha I’m new to gardening. This video is so EPIC!!!
The biochar pit seems to work really well! When the fire is burning well (no smoke) what material is going up in the flames? Carbon?
Can this method be used to make charcoal for BBQ too, without the crushing and inoculation?
Richard, I am awed in how intergraded your farm projects work together. I love your comments on raw milk. Are your cows Holsteins?
Funny line "communicate with your neighbors!" :)
I have a papermill close by that uses wood chips to power a boiler. The chips don't burn completely up and is basically charcoal. Would you utilize this free resource?
Shaun White Are you completly sure that they are not burning other stuff in the boiler as well?
For instance primary and secondary sludge, coal amongst other fuels.
Johan Mattsson will definitely double check before use. But from previous inquiry, just a way to get rid of excess chip's.
Shaun White perhaps also check if they are using stuff like fertilizer or ammonia to reduce NOx, I am not sure what it ends up as after it's been through 800 degrees celsius, it all ends up either through the chimney or in the ashes.
Sorry if I come across as negative, that is not my intent. I just want you to know the potential problems/issues there could be since you probably are going to eat the stuff you grow in it. But as I said, I'm not sure that there even is a problem at all.
can i buy you a note pad?
nick notepad sucks cause its another blody item you need to cary around.... Hands i other place one will most likelly have to cary with him anyway so why not to put them in to more uses? Think holistic :p
Thanks Richard. If you build a cone of kindling wood and then light a fire at the top of it. This will help convert the initial fire into charcoal in a similar way to Top Lit Updraft gassifying
Stove . Best wishes Rod
that wood looks dry, but you say that it's been soaked and is wet, how do you burn wet wood?
I burn brush and tree trimings , after it burns down I put it out with water, no special pit, then rake out the charcoal, is there any difference in the end product? other than I know a lot of it does turn to ash there's too much to worry about
I wish the audio was better but closed captions help out.
In CapeTown, SAfrica🇿🇦I want to know if one can burn the wood of alien vegetation "port jackson & blue-gum trees" to make biochar? Thank you for the video & sharing your knowledge. Stephen D
🦋🐞🐝☀️🌦🌈🌠
Can you tell me what kind of apple you mentioned in the video? Also is it the kind that grows well from seed?
apples are usually grafts. johnny apple seed was a bunch of malarkey
It’s a cider apple I don’t remember the name
I was wondering what's on your hand, is it to do list🤔😅
amazing video bro
Can you use biochar as Charcoal?
Richard I had a question for you. We have access to large amounts of wood chips here. I’ve used your method to make pit char before but I’m wondering if we could smolder burn a large pile of wood chips into biochar- could you give me any feed back on this thought.
Biochar is created without open flame.
Could you remind us what the area of beds is (excluding paths) so we can compare volume of biochar calculated to area of beds. Thanks. great video
Last time I heard (last month) it's 200 beds at 0.75*10m = ~1500m^2 Jod.
How deep is the cone?
The surface area of a piece of charcoal is immense and can hold more bacteria/water etc than the equivalent volume of soil. I get that. All good. What I'm less clear on, is what is the value of going through all that when all the the bacteria, fungi and so on that are of direct benefit to a growing plant are the ones occupying sites along the roots, root hairs etc? They are the ones exchanging sugars and doing all that good stuff - the ones chilling out in their fancy char hotel off in the soil somewhere are a bit pointless aren't they? Why not just add them directly with your compost/extract/tea?
This is the point that mystifies me a bit about biochar. Happy for someone to explain it to me but I have chatted with Elaine Ingham about this as well and she seemed to feel similarly. Maybe there's something I'm (we're) not getting here. Clearly it does no harm, (and I'm not being negative!) I'm just genuinely interested to understand the benefit of all that work when adding/boosting biology and/or carbon into soil can be achieved in simpler ways. Keep up all the good work! :)
As far as I understand it, the "fancy char hotel" is what gets the microbes through times where there is not much food available. We all know, that bacteria can reproduce in almost no time, so when the food offer is huge, I wouldn't be concerned about the few microbes, that are chilling out. There will be more than enough of them, to do the "dirty work" we want them to do.. ;-)
When things get tough though, they have a save haven from which they can start in force when times get better.
So it's more about keeping a solid base alive all the time.
The terra preta of South America and the black earth in Africa have conserved nutrients (and water) for centuries. As I understand it, nitrogen volatilizes very quickly, many minerals are 'washed' out of the soil by rain, etc., and organic material decomposes quite rapidly.... needing constant replenishment. If you have a constant supply, fine, but if not, conserving it with biochar might be extremely helpful. I think the historical picture tells the story.
you are adding too much wood in one hit (too many hands;). You should add more regularly with less wood... leave a little longer... aim for NO smoke production.
i'm looking for some good biochar, and found this info about the internal surface area: "Biochar is created through a non-combusting thermal destructive distillation of biomass in an oxygen free environment. This makes for a Biochar with exceptional internal surface area, much more active than charcoal made by smouldering combustion." would you agree that using the cone pit method leads to inferior biochar?
The whole point of the cone design is to deny oxygen from being sucked into the bottom, which it does. Whether you think it's "inferior" to biochar made with machines costing thousands of dollars is very subjective; what we need are scientific studies done comparing the different methods and closely examining the pore structure and composition as well as testing it in the field so we can compare the effectiveness. I'm sure there is marketing hype at play so we just need the actual data and comparisons. The question for you is, if you could make biochar in a pit for essentially free, what % effectiveness are you willing for it to be compared to mass-produced char made in a complete vacuum, which costs a lot?
why change queens in the hives?
Activated carbon pore size 5-50 nm
Bacteria size 0,2 - 2 mkm
Do not fit in any way.
@20:20 "hello you beauty" - the seduction was real :)
Thanks
What you want it the white amber, that's the sign of a complete combustion, your biochar was full of unburned wood, which you want to avoid. also you should try to use scrap wood like cuttings and so on, and not chop trees to make charcoal, though in Sweden the wood is plentiful so, not a big deal.
I'm curious if you have any concerns about human pathogens in the urine? Maybe use the urine at the start of the hot composting process so it has a chance to deal with those deadly pathogens. Soak your char in worm castings/quality aged compost instead maybe. All the best mate, love your farm.
As a general rule urinr is sterile, it is the manure that has the pathogens. God bless!
I´d qualify your take on milk a bit. Saying that something is completely bad or completely good is mostly oversimplification.
Grass fed, well kept animal products in small quantities (!) can be useful.
And yes, they are historically a relativly big part of the reason why humans can thrive in climates that do not produce a lot of directly-edible food year-round (savannas, northern climates with harsh winters, high mountains and so on).
That however does not mean that "milk is great for your bones" or you should consume anywhere close to the modern western diets amount of those products. Grass fed or factory farmed.
A good shorthand for the question "how good is that for me to eat" is to ask "how natural is the behaviour that leads to me eating it".
That puts at least a warning sign to animal products (less so for meat), because approaching large animals with horns, living in herds, and trying to get at their essential nutrition, is a recipie for getting yourself killed as a primitive human.
We clearly found ways to do that, but those are rather recent adaptions (lactase) and very obviously not the food that we evolved to eat.
I know, the relativly short and ad-hoc videos are not a great place for detailed discussions (of topics you did not plan to discuss) , so know that i mean no offense by adding a bit more elaboration and nuance to the topic.
Thanks for the video.
should be careful sticking your hand into watery fire pits... the ash is highly alkaline and can cause chemical burns.
Sorry to say, but that is not biochar. It is a combination of ash and incomplete combusted wood. To make biochar you need to heat to wood so it releases its gases in a chamber where oxygen is very limited. If the wood changes to ash you did something wrong. The gases are later ignited to keep the wood hot enough to continue to give all gases until nothing but a carbon skeleton results. The pH can be set by controlling the temperature at which the wood releases the gases. Rj - Beyond Harvest Veganistas
I bury the lot in green grass clippings, leave the fire cooking slowly overnight and then quench it in the morning.
👍👍👌🌶🍒
not water but soil n grass
Quick way to burn a cord of wood 🥺
Biochar doesn't make smoke
In the process
Doesn't BioChar make your soil more alkaline... If you already have very alkaline soil, wouldn't it make it worse...
No, it is pretty close to being pH neutral. Now if you combust the charcoal to gray ash, that will be alkaline.
What a waste of energy. You get 1 benefits instead of multiple.
You don’t need to do all this nonsense you can just put the wood right in the soil it does the exact same thing breaks down the same at the exact same amount of carbon you weren’t transforming the carbon into any state you’re just burning off all the flammables
That’s not true. Charcoal is a stable substance and can take 1000 years to break down, not so with wood buried in the earth.
You don’t get the same water retention or soil compaction resistance that char can offer if your soil needs it.