The sheer scale of the Tera Preta boggles the mind. Just the many foot deep mass of char, and the amount of wood burned, crushed is immense. Then again, almost everything ancient peoples did boggles the mind...
when I think about the amount I've made by myself in a few years it starts to make sense when you think about sedentary cultures with large populations cooking on open fires and probably charring everything else. Tropics grow a lot of biomass. But yeah, it's something else to think about all that human activity leaving such a large permanent effect. I trip out frequently on the amazing things people have done that are already fallen to pieces. Now we have so much power and so many resources and tools at our disposal and people think it's amazing if you build a crappy shed. A friend of mine just told me he's made 120 yards of biochar in the last couple years.
Hi Josh, I started blacksmithing a little and told my friend and said those ancient blacksmiths could do great stuff. He said, "yeah, well what else did they have to do?" That gave me a chuckle.
I use charcoal as a natural barrier against disease on tree wounds either roots or branch pruning . I have transplanted large trees by hand that I believe would have rotted and died if I hadn't used it. All you do is rub the charcoal onto the wound until it's completely black. I have a 60 year old wisteria that was ripped out the ground by a machine and said to the worker can I have it thinking that it had little chance of surviving but after I had re cut the torn roots and limbs I applied the charcoal to the wounds and it's still alive 3 years later. Is only because I tried it and gave it a chance it's alive today.
For really small scale, saliva also work quite well. Our saliva is a natural disinfectant. Although for obvious reason can't be used in large scale. ;-) Cheers
I love the look of wisteria, I hate the care needed to keep wisteria within bounds. Also, I think it's next to impossible to kill, even if you wanted to. It redefines 'tenacious'.
Pit planting definitely works. I dumped piles of mulched tree leaves, weeds, compost, sifted soil and woodstove charcoal/ash into a large garbage can shaped hole for my Puget Gold Apricot tree before I planted it. Reason being is I live on an ancient Fraser River gravel bar where the soil is poor and consists of 20% rocks and has a high clay content. There's head sized river boulders 2 feet below the top soil and they only get larger as I dig deeper. Trees and deep rooted plants have a hard time getting established in the rocky clay soil. I notice that the Frost Peach I planted without such a deep pit is not fairing as well. The Apricot is a monster and should start to produce this Spring in it's fourth year. I've been pruning it quite a lot to control the limb size and shape of the tree. The drought resistance of the tree is also incredible since I imagine quite a spongy soil collects moisture from the surrounding clay.
The theory of the tera petra is that the tribes were creating biochar to use in compost toilets. The pots were used as toilets, and the biochar was spread over the excrement to control the smell (similar to how we use woodchips). When the pots were full they were emptied into pits. If the pots were in bad shape they were just tossed into the pits too.
Jared Diamond has written several books on ancient civilizations and how they were able to thrive or not. A collection pit has been part of many an ancient societies .
You have inspired me the other day in "don't burn your brush" I was just going to Hoogle garden it but then it occurred to me to make bio char. My brother then asked me what does bio char do? That's when I came in and dug through the UA-cam videos on bio char. Your video included. I am so impressed with it that I am now processing my branches that saw off to remove ladder fuels in my Forest. Thank you for your diligence in sharing.
Hopefully your results will be as good as mine and a lot of others, but only one way to find out. i've made lots of it from ladder fuels and a lot of the trees I trimmed to head height 10 years ago need trimming again.
I like the term Bichar Catch Pit. Persistence is everything! I moved into my current place 5 years ago with a backyard not much more than a sand long jump pit, 8x20 foot. In the summer neighborhood cats used it as a litter box and in the spring stinging nettles covered everything. After composting, woodchip layers, and the occasional dump of charcoal and ashes from a BBQ there is a garden the next inhabitants will take over. I never planned to stay here long, but my gardening thumbs were itching and now I have a successfully rooted grapevine, rosemary, and two lavender bushes. After some trial and error, I realized giant sunflowers could send roots deep enough to pull nutrients from far underground, and regularly have a sunflower forest come midsummer.
I've read about the terra preta pits in the Amazon, and I agree with you, they're obviously deliberate. They say that the soil contains not only charcoal, but also bits and pieces of pottery, which many believe proves that the pits were just old garbage middens. But what if the clay pots where just the method the locals used for creating and introducing the char into the soil? Take a simple unglazed pot and stuff it full of bio material, then seal a lid with a small hole in the top to allow wood gas to escape, then toss it into the evening cooking fire and you've got a pot full of bio char. Don't bother emptying it, just toss it into the old garden pit and break it open with a stick, then mix it with some regular soil and maybe some fertilizer or mulch, and you've got terra preta. I wonder if anybody ever tried piecing those potshards together to see just what kind of pots they really were?
I wonder if there is any evidence of them being actual pits v.s. middens. It might not matter too much either way, as the effect may eventually be similar. I would guess that char was made with similar open methods with piles or pits to what I use, or in piles and pits covered with earth. Clay pots might work, but even a quick clay pot of any size is a bunch of work. Pottery societies always have a steady stream of broken pots. Given the large areas covered and the percentages of charcoal, it seems unlikely that it was random. Even if they were middens, it's hard to believe that it wasn't systematic and that the char wasn't produced intentionally. Hopefully more information will come out about the methodology of'African Dark Earths. I haven't look in a while, but when that stuff was first published there didn't seem to be anything about how the char was made and how materials were applied.
@@SkillCult I realize this is a very old comment but can't help myself. What if they were old trash pits that were burnt every so often to lower the level? I'm sure it was difficult to dig that large of a pit back then. Maybe as they began to fill up they were set a flame to drop the height of the fill. Not everything would burn completely. Then more was added on top etc, etc. After a few iterations of this I feel certain the people would notice plants growing more vigorously on the old pits and connect the dots on planting above old trash pits.
Love your videos Steven. Your comments regarding our current wording on typical 'waste' are especially thoughtful, it's something that can't be emphasized enough. Our current language and connotations around it really do need an overhaul.
Yes, it's hard to talk about that stuff at all without defining terms or spelling it all out. Sometimes that's better anyway since words don't mean the same thing to everyone, but it's inconvenient.
That's my general idea as well, it may take more time to spell it out, but we have plenty of time so why not the extra few minutes. Might just leave a lasting change in ideas.
Communicating with words is fraught with danger in the first place. I'm a fan of remembering that words are not things and only so many assumptions can be made about what they mean to other people. we have to be careful of what they mean to us too and how language and cultural meaning limit our perception and thought. I think the deepest phenomena of intuitive thinking probably transcend language, but most of us think in our personal interpretation of our language, which is coded with extreme bias. People like buzz words and phrases that are supposed to hold some common meaning. It saves a lot of time but results in a lot of very shallow conversations and potential for miscommunication. So, I think it's very good to talk some stuff out in more specific terms to define what exactly we are talking about and help define and refine our own understanding. But, simple words that have a common meaning are essential for easy rapid communication too and we need a terminology for end of use items or soil food or whatever that stuff I was talking about is, because that's what we'll use 95% of the time. But we definitely don't talk stuff out enough and I think we should do so every once in a while at least.
That is a fantastic description of a real complex process. Its interesting that you mention simple words because i spent a solid 5 minutes trying to think of one for all currently viewed waste before submitting and putting quotations around the word. I do like soil food though, not what it was but what it will become. I detest the terms 'green' or 'earth friendly' because they have become exactly that, a shell of their original intent and a means to market certain styles of products. The ideas those terms were supposed to embody are almost lost in the soothing light green packaging. Or mention Capitalism and Communism and suddenly there is a polar split in thinking and everybody is arguing even though they are just different methods of supposedly looking after a population, both with positives and negatives. The words have instilled in them meaning more then is in any dictionary, they invoke certain feelings. One of my former lecturers often said that if your told that something (be it words, ideas or structures ) has always "just been" then that is really what you should be having a look at more closely. These ideas and words haven't always existed they were created for a reason and that purpose can change over time and the word or idea with it. It's often forgotten that if a definition no longer suits then they can be altered or superseded.
Thank you for taking the time to share all your knowledge with us - it's much appreciated! I feel particularly passionate about the potential of biochar and it makes me sad that I can't share my excitement with most of my friends since I know they wouldn't understand it... Keep up your good work - the followers will come!
Almost everyone I know that should be doing biochar still is not, or just barely dabbling with it. Most people are followers. I've been thinking a lot about that today and how even in the circles that should jump right in, everyone waits for someone else to get on the dance floor. I want to package this idea in a way that will give the illusion of legitimacy and assuage whatever it is that keeps people from acting.
Impressively simple yet effective. Zero waste is the way to go. Make soil to make food is common sense. I appreciate your common sense. Thank you for your video.
I couldn't agree more! Just think of how many toxic algae blooms could be avoided, if we stopped using chemical fertilisers, that leach through the soil and into the waterways. I grew up in NE Iowa, and have noted that when I was a kid, the soil in the fields was almost black. Now it all looks like clay.
I love this. this kind of incremental approach can be really powerful. It makes me think of the shell middens which have been found to be meters deep and kilometers long (except this is useful). Tiny actions add up for good or ill.
Yes, it's so true. I've really noticed how some things seem impossible if you sit around doing the math, but then they just happen if you start plugging away slowly.
I'm gonna' try this in out yard and hope my Thai neighbors show some interest in it. So much brush gets burnt here every year and the soil is SO poor. Our soil is just red,iron oxide,no Humus. Weeds hardly can grow on it.
Great idea. IM doing something simular. I can't make a hole. the home owners group would get me..lol. But I am making char, mixing it with worm castings, scraps from fish i catch and fellet, cuttings from my kitchen. Once full. I let it sit for six months and then blend it into my garden. I jsut started, so donlt have results yet, I knw that the fisj guts are helpful . Iuse to burry them in the grass of the yard with a post hole digger. The grass always grew better. Look forward to seeing your garden do awesome. Thanks for sharing.
The one thing I'd encourage is keeping track of how much you put here and doing minimum percentages. Better yet, install different percentages adjacent to each other to compare. If you spread it too randomly or in too small quantities, you'll fail to realize a large effect.
You could call your catch pile a "Midden" pile, which is a pile of kitchen waste. The term is often associated with sea food shells, but it also means any organic kitchen waste and even human poop.
That's a pretty good idea. I'm familiar with the term and phenomenon. Midden pit maybe. It doesn't really communicate intention or purpose other than disposal. Thanks for the idea.
Absolutely love this. There are great people doing research in this field, trying to figure out how to make a carbon negative way of producing biochar and improving soils at the same time. It is quite possible that this could be the way that we as a whole could make it work. Creating proper biochar at the scientific level is a little more complex in trying to get a clean burn and reaching the proper temperatures to get a proper PH at the end product, but it is definitely doable. In some African countries, they use a stove that uses a process to make biochar while they are cooking food. That might be an awesome way to do it for the home user. As for my urban farm in my back yard, I am super excited about implementing this as I have very poor sandy soil. All the research points to the idea that I will have drastic improvements in my soil with this type of method. Super excited! Thanks for sharing. Would love an update!
I just use open burn methods that are really easy. All process freeze some carbon. The problem for most is accessibility, not perfect char. When I stopped worrying about the people telling me it had to be made a certain way, I produced a couple thousand gallons of the stuff and counting. Iv'e done a bunch of pits and trenches now. These artichoke pits I can't really judge until the plants are established and the old plants are removed completely to reduce competition.
@@SkillCult Most of my business has been built on the idea that something is better than nothing and that something can always be better. It allows me the freedom to try something and to get things moving while still allowing me the flexibility to experiment and make things better as I go on. Been down the rabbit hole a bit and love that there is actual research on the higher level trying to make this 100% carbon neutral / carbon negative. So, that's just something neat. As for your channel, Thanks for all the varied content. I've only just been gardening for a year now (started April last year) and your playlist on pruning was enlightening and a great watch. Totally love the multi-year experiments and examples!
Just discovered your channel today.... and subscribed after watching a few videos. Awesome stuff, and thanks for sharing. Just bought a house 2 years ago and have been gradually adding and expanding our garden ever since. Can't wait to experiment with your techniques. And I'm a big fan of biochar - been adding it to my soil since day one. We had to clear a bunch of trees to create a sunny garden spot and all of the limbs / brush were burned and added back to the soil as we went (And I got 5 cords of firewood, too!) Can't wait to see your future posts
Cool. Welcome to the channel. I've got plenty more in store for sure. Way to be proactive on the biochar. It actually took me a couple years to really get started, but I've made quite a bit in a short time. Always want more though. Scorched earth policy lol. I'm all about these pits. I just have one all the time now slowly filling up with whatever.
Because of the soil quality in my garden I absolutely had to add something, so I began with leaves, grass clippings and biochar immediately upon moving in.... a year before we started actually began digging beds / adding fencing We have only about 2" of poor top soil over a clay / boulder mix. You should see the wonderful Mayan pyramid we're building from the rocks we've removed from our very modestly sized garden. I think I'm going to try your catch pit on the area we'd like to expand to next. With all of the oaks / maples in my yard I get somewhere around 30+ yards of leaves from the front yard each fall. I think layering that with compost, biochar, grass clippings and other crap will have a great impact (after removing 10,000 rocks, of course). Thanks again!
Hi, I am Jaime from Chile. Dude I think you are the closest to actually making Terra Preta, but I think you should meke it in a drum. The Amazonian Indians needed big pieces of charcoal for their pottery kilns so their open trenches were quite deep so they could put in bigger logs. Since the trenches were dug in clay so with heat generated with making the charcoal and the steam after the process the clay would end up getting cooked and so they would hold water. So they were making anaerobic compost. Every time they would dump stuf in the trench they wold add dirt to stop the flies and to stop the smell they would throw small pieces of charcoal unsuitable for their kilns. I wold put a lid on the drum at the end, the Indians I'm pretty sure they wold cap these trenches with more clay before the rainy season so the excess water would run off ... So I would Also put a spigot at the bottom to make it drip... Clay holds water but it does sweat. Anyway I hope your experiments keep giving you success stories
Organic pit is freaking amazing burnt or not. Plus the extra dirt can be used in raised gardens, or to level bumps in the terrain. _Diggy diggy hole, I'm digging a hole!_
I like Nutrition Banking. I've been refering to the pits as catch pits. I like that too. Anyway, it just makes sense right? I've got two of these artichoke pits and working on filling the third circular tree pit. Over the next ten to twenty years, we'll see how they do.
SkillCult I just ordered 2 packs of your leek seed to Gresham Oregon. In the link below we discuss nutrition banking on a old logging pile full of stumps. Check it out. hummingbirdhavennw.blogspot.fi/?m=1
lol You and I are kindred spirits. I used to have 126 apples on M9 rootstock, 6 pears on OldHome, but they each had another 8 grafts on each. 6 Cherries on Gisele 5, 3 peaches 1 Nectarine and 6 plum all on St.Julien. I also had 3 apples on M26. Every day,I pissed my way around the orchard. Lots of goodies in our urine for plants to absorb. Biochar is a great idea too. I'm def going to add that to my plant feeding system in the near future.
Yeah, I'm just about out of room for more apple grafts. The only thing that might save me is that I'm ready to start cutting stuff out and replacing it! I'm happy to see that people are catching on to urine as a fertilizer. I'd like to promote it as much as possible. It contains most of the plant nutrients leaving our bodies and not using it is like strip mining our soils and then systematically flushing that fertility into the ocean.
My dad and I think we have a system to keep rodents out. We're clearing out a large plot of the land and going to put an fence up around the perimeter of the property that the dogs can run around in. Then put a fence up around the garden inside the yard to keep the dogs out. We haven't put it into application yet, but that's the initial idea. Everything should be operational by next summer hopefully, and I'll be making a point to make charcoal now instead of just ash while we clear out the yard of the dying ash trees.
Don’t you just hear about Terra Preta and know it is the real deal? I have buried my kitchen scraps in the ground and watched trees thrive, and this is even better. I’m a 70 year old woman in a trailer park so it won’t take that long to do my whole yard! Thank you!
Burn some lime. I do have soil, though it isn't naturally very fertile, it;s not bad by any means and it is a good base to work from. I got lucky. Most of my neighbors have clay soil, very heavy.
I had to watch this twice because the first time around, I kept getting distracted by all the birds! I'm jealous. It must be awesome to have an eagle for a neighbor. I'm making the necessary changes to invite them into my yard, but it's slow going. Thanks for the info! Can't wait until fall when I can start fires without getting fined.
+SkillCult yeah, thats where i was stumped, like seriously. The earth is a recycling plant, people throw stuff out they shouldn't. As you said they're valuable resources. When i finally get the chance to i'll give it a go and tell you if it works in Australia with the resources i have available here. You know, experimentation and sharing information is how the world grows.
Yeah, would love to hear any long term feedback. It's definitely a very long term project. Because of the very uncontrolled nature of it, it will be a decade or more till skeptical people are going to be convinced of anything, which is as it should be. I'm tempted to set up some side by side trials using equivalent inputs aside from charcoal.
@@alicestiener556- For what it's worth. Here goes a tip. Make your digging, compost heap, etc. on a "high" spot. Anything leaching from it will automatically and surely fertilize downstream. So a lot more area can be easily covered, without further input. ;-) Note of caution: DO NOT do it close to a water source, stream, pond, well, or on high water table. Particularly if using "diseased" components. Certainly there's a big difference between burying the carcass of a canary or a cow! Some common sense is useful here. LOL ;-) With this said, given the right conditions it should be a social obligation to do so. ;-) Cheers
Any new updates on this technique? I'm doing something similar, both based on what I saw you doing and my own research on terra preta. I'm looking forward to seeing how my own experiments go, but I'd love an update on yours.
If someone were starting a new garden and they needed to clear weeds, could they spread charcoal onto the weeds and just wait a year for the charcoal to innoculate itself at the expense of the weeds? Kill two birds with one stone?
I dont' think it would stop the weeds. Sitting around might help some with precharging it though. hard to say. I just add extra fertilizer and stuff when I dig it in.
I don't worry about it personally. if you put a lot in, it can cause problems, but it's just food and it rots. I think people think that it the organisms it will grow can be dangerous, but I doubt that's a really legitimate problem.
Any update to this video? How is that plant doing? Did you end up doing two more? I looked but didn't see a video. Thanks for the information and entertainment!
Not really. I plan to remove the one next to it this year to let this one grow. Once it's down to one row of plants and they have had time to settle in, I can make some comparisons.
If ur in town and ur doing this on a small scale you can infact get royal oak lump charcoal which is essentially oragnic charcoal with vegtable meal you can easily buy a bag for close to 8 bucks and bring it home and soak in compost and water or urine fishemulsion whatever
@@SkillCult i am tottaly immersed in biochar just the science and evidence tgat backs how carbon negative and amazing charcoal is. The surface of a gram is 9000 sq feet its just insane its like lil bacteria condos..i can just dream of the different ways you can manipulate this resource to create fertility like imagine what kind of knf experiments you can cook up and put into charcoal. I was curious of the capacity it might have to carry fungis and if i could innoculate it with wine cap and put it in a straw bed. How can i take it and essentially charge it with some high cellulose material or wrotting grain sprouts so i can get mushrooms to run through it. I dunno but i might try it.
Someone I knew who like Thomas Alva Edison, went to the extremes. He said to me his soil mixture by volume of 40% activated carbon or charcoal powder, 5% limestone rock dust, 5% gypsum rock dust, 40% composite rock dust mixtures, and 10% inocculated compost-humus or 10% inocculated peat. Simultaneously mixed together while being sprayed by a water mister to simultaneously moisten it (NOT WET IT) and to prevent dusts from being emitted during the mixing-blending process. Then he started using a stanless steel mesh pot lined with geotexttile fabric to get advantage also of the air pruning effect. I wonder what are the results that he has gotten?
You mentioned getting clippings and waste from the city. My question is would there be any effect from the chemicals they use on said clippings? Or would it simply be burned off during the creation of the biochar?
they (the terra petra buiders) used to put their night waste/trash/etc into clay pots, cover it with charcoal and ash to hide the smell. when full they would chuck it into the pit. that is the reason there are pottery shards in the pit. The charcoal is innoculated with the feces bacteria (same as innoculating with worm castings or compost tea), the pottery shards provide another biome for beneficial life. I do not think they understood what the benefits were, but knew that it worked. While crapping in a pot doesnt sound appealing today you can do essentially the same thing with innoculated charcoal and another porous matieral (small pumice stones or pottery if you can find it).
As someone who has made some primitive pottery that scenario is impossible to believe. I mean if you are saying that the pots were essentially disposable. I've little doubt that human excrement was part of the system though. Cultures that use clay pots every day, break them all the time, especially soft fired primitive pottery that is frequently used on open flames. So, over time, a lot of clay sherds would accumulate. I don't think that trash piles, v.s. pits is at all hard to believe either. Digging without metal tools is a bunch of work. But if it's for large scale pernanent soil improvement it is not infeasible in the least.
Absolutely, although I do not know much about pottery. The refuse, and perhaps some other form of night soil container (wood?) probably was used. I am not an expert in any of this, but I do know that charcoal needs to be charged with beneficial bacteria, either purposely or by an indirect means. the refuse pits probably got feces, trash, biomass, pottery, and everything else. Maybe they burned the pits occasionally to clean up a bit. Anyways, my only point was the need to charge the charcoal, and offered my ideas on it from what I have read and watched. Groovy and good luck!
@@mikeb5748 It does seem to make sense that they just threw everything in there. Only part I would have reason to question is disposable pottery. I definitely like the idea that char could be burned in the pits, either by open flash burns like I do in trenches, or even covered and smothered with dirt in slow burns like traditional charcoal methods do. Likely there was some variation as well. Cheers.
love the concept but do roots really go down that deep for most crops? i mean there are definitely deep rooted crops but most dont go deeper then 2 feet.
Here they certainly do. We have long dry summers and anything that lives through the summer goes quite deep. Elsewhere the effect may be more surface. Hard to say without a lot of testing. I'm on the working assumption that deeper is better, but largely influenced by my climate.
Im learning about growing with char but i clicked because i like the dreads haha. I have the same hairstyle minus the dreads. P.s. you have great hilly land to try geoff lawson's permaculture systems!!
@Jeff Clark I'm in Appalachia and interested in any pointers I can get growing sustainable food on steep hillsides Do u have links about growing on hilly land?
yeah, that bed is like a graph basically except it starts sloping back down on the 10% end. It might just be the usual problem of things not growing as well at the ends of beds, not sure. I'm actually pretty surprised that they are so big given that I put them in late and didn't get them fertilized and mulched for quite a while. That bed is only amended to 10 or 12 inches too. All the new stuff I'm doing to 2 feet or more.
precursor challenge - no possible way I can get past, 1.5 ft = bedrock hardcore stuff down there. challenge #1- growing food challenge #2 - eating and preserving all the food.
Awesome. Any idea if the decomposition will produce much methane? I think compost piles that are not turned produce methane, which causes climate damage. Do you think this does, too?
THere's not a lot to report. I have two of them going, but I havne't cut out the old plants next to them, which have tapped into the pits and are bigger than ever. One prodcued over 75 artichokes last year. I might take them out after this season and then we'll see how the others do. It takes a while for the plants to become really established in order to compare to the plants near them. Then we'll have something to look at. I'll keep in mind dropping it in a day on the homestead video sometime.
Welcome. similarities might end there lol. But any of us in mountain areas tend to have thin soils unless in a bottom of some kind. Our mountains are a whole lot younger so the number and depth of bottom lands is much less. The "holler" effect is a lot less. My soil is actually awesome compared to other areas here and relatively deep, but still not very fertile. I asked a friend growing potatoes in an alluvial plain in a larger valley here what she fertilized them with and she said "nothing, it's bottom land". That's beyond my experience here. Soil here is a substrate to work with and add things to in order to grow anything much.
Very nice idea and great message. But I don't totally agree with your method, because how do you prevent anaerobic conditions from ocurring inside the hole? Do the animals that scavenge and dig in it provide enough aeration? Because worms, insects and fine first plant roots don't really like anaerobic conditions.A farmer I know told me about an experiment where they put a layer of straw (maybe half a meter thick) inside a huge trench about a meter deep and filled it up with dirt. After three years they dug it up and the straw was nearly unchanged and pretty much compacted, no worms where found and no root developement down to the straw. With your system the risk of compacting are much smaller than on a full scale farm but still there, especially because you seem to have quite heavy clay soil. Also I think the people in south america did just layer their waste material and charcoal over hundreds or thousands of years continually planting and letting animals till it. Digging like you did is quite energy intensive but probably the quickest way as we don't have generations of people layering for us.
I just don't worry about that. We'll see how the plants grow, but I think it will be be very well. Also, I'm not burying just straw, I've got lots of nitrogen in there. if it stalls it will only be in the short term. Any other approach I can think of would just add more work, like precomposting everything and then adding it for instance. Even if it took a year to be ready, I'd still probably do it this way just because it's easy and convenient. It's a long term project. But I think it will do well pretty much as soon as it's done. In this pit I'm adding tons of kitchen waste because I get a lot of it from a local resort and am looking for ways to use it. It should be a good test. There is so much of it in there that it will take a while to rot down and settle enough to even really finish backfilling. So, we'll see how it goes with that and how the one I put in last year with the new artichoke does. It either works or it doesn't but keeping it simple is important for my goals and the whole system the way I conceive of it.
not yet. That plant keeps getting munched by gophers and hit pretty hard this year. I also still have not removed the gigantic one right next to it and I think that is just dominating the root zone. I'll probably cut it out this year.
I wouldn't worry about that at all. The only thing I might do is break up the soil afterward in case if fired hard enough to form a hard layer. I've burned in the trenches both before and when partly full. I think it's fine to burn layers as you progress to add char.
Does the biochar prevent the smell of your gut piles from coming out? Where I live any gut pile not buried at least 4' deep and covered right away will have bears, and other animals pull the gut pile out within a week.
It can help, especially if you use a lot, but animals have a pretty keen sense of smell. But it's known for absorbing odors. For bears, electric fence, everything else I just tolerate, except dogs.
@@SkillCult Yeah that makes sense, as it's part of the nature cycle of things to let smaller animals take away these carcasses. Thanks for your videos and all the information you're a legend my brother
@@SkillCult question... I work construction and see houses and buildings get dug into virgin soil and a lot of nails, and other materials get buried with the house after completion (it's a lot better than it was years ago but we still leave the ground worse than we found it). Now do you think adding a percentage of biochar to the ground filling stage of construction like in your trench it would have a positive effect on the environment and peoples lawns and help make cities less of an environmental issue?
hi mr Skillcult greetings from ibiza , first I want thank you for all the really good tips and info you provide in your channel, because you axe info I got my first axe (2.5 pounds head) some months ago instead of buying saw like the silky ones tipe, and I am super happy with my decission. About this video, I would like to ask you about bokashi technique ( it is suposed to provide 100% natural soil fertilizer in about 2-4 weeks), and your opinion about it?.(sorry for my english, catalan is mother language). have a nice day
I have not used it, but it's a neat idea. I'm inclined toward the Korean Natural Farming microbe culture techniques. They use whatever the local soil organisms for the forest are. I still have not messed with it, though I've made a lot of random compost and manure teas. Too many things to try, not enough time! Oh, but I do put forest duff into these pits for microbes. If I did anything more, it would probably be to make tea from weeds, manure and decayed leaves from the forest, but i probably won't get to it.
That's actually a style setting that sony has for timelapses called miniature. It shifts and hypersaturates colors and blurs the top and bottom of the image. It's fun. I do have a lensbaby tiltshift lens that I found in a thrift store, but I have hardly used it.
Great video Steven, couple of questions. I have watched at least some of your biochar videos before, but cannot remember if you process/sort the char for different things or is it all directed towards soil amending? Do you sort out the big stuff for blacksmithing for example? Also, with reference to adding carcasses and gut piles, you've mentioned your bear situation before. Don't the bears home in on a gut pile in the catchpit? Even if its under a layer of biochar and soil? We have a healthy bear population and very healthy coyote population, which I try not to attract too close. We don't live as close to the edge of the woodland as you seem to, approximately 100+ yards of open hayfield separate us, which has seemed so far to be too open cover for the bears to traverse.
I've had some trouble with bears. Everything else I don't really mind, raccoon and skunks and stuff. This pit is inside an electric fence. Bears seem to have moved on for this year. The methods I use for biochar produce soft charcoal. I've seen people say that is bad and people say that it's good. I don't really care that much at this point because it's so easy to produce and I know it works. Accessibility is more important to me and a lot of people than making the absolute best charcoal by whatever means necessary. I do save a little, just as I'm sorting through, but not much. I really need to set up another means of making smithing charcoal and have been stashing some wood for that. I can use this though and have. I used it in the black jack video. ua-cam.com/video/aOBtaARfLwU/v-deo.html&lc=z13vetshsyztgly4i04cf5fy1trlepj5arc0k
I understand what you mean about the "quality" charcoal question. I think a lot of time is wasted in the biochar discussion messing around with retort designs etc vs figuring out how to best use it as a soil amendment in different soils and climates.
I just think the best thing we can do now is proceed by any means with whatever materials and situation is at hand. Plenty of people have proven that it can work with low tech approaches and the complication and debate and dogma just keeps people from acting. It took me a couple of years to get started because I was waiting to build some kind of retort or something. Once I started using simple means I've produced hundreds of gallons of charcoal. We can worry about tweaks and details later.
All kinds of bones. I just toss them in for long term fertility. Crushing or otherwise breaking down bones is on my list of things to figure out though. I have an old account that uses quicklime and wood ashes. Ashes alone definitely weakened them, but didn't dissolve them.
If you make bone broth out of them first then they soften to the point of being easily crushed, and you have a healthy mineral and collagen rich base for soups etc.
Not really. I still haven't taken the monster artichoke near this out and it provides a lot of competition as it's very old. This year a rodent got most of the shoots too :(
Around me they sell "cowboy charcoal" and it is chunks of scrap from wood cabinet makers and it is 1x4 and other small pieces of wood and it is turned into charcoal that should be a way to use in the ground char!? Anyone have an opinion?
Should be fine. You will find people arguing for this or that kind of charcoal, but I think you probably couldn't find a natural wood charcoal, regardless of how it is prepared or charged or innoculated, that doesn't have any effect once it settles in.
this vid just inspired me to overhaul my small suburban backyard. i have sand. all sand. everywhere. i'm wondering if i dig out all my flower beds down like a foot, start throwing in compost and nasty rotting good stuff and then layer with biochar that i can make in my fire pit, i think that would be a good start. but do i layer sand back over of all that and plant? or should i look at importing some better soil? i live in a high desert, so the sand might take over again. what do you think, Senor Edholm?
I would think about getting some soil with clay in it as well. I'm not sure at what percentage char would become detrimental instead of helpful. Organic matter in those soils burns right up. I would keep your eyes out from some real soil. Even subsoil if it has the right composition to improve your sand. You can grow in sand or anything else with enough water and nutrients. Pretty much thats what hydroponics is, but it's not idea.
thank you. i'll keep an eye out. that's gonna get pricey, importing soil. ugh. but i got my first batch of biochar done. turned out pretty good. bout 1/3 of a wheelbarrow full
Maybe not. I was assuming food. It may also change the PH and shift it higher. Those soils are often already high ph, so that's something to think about
Yes, my guess is that we will see it as a standard potting mix ingedient soon. Once production is normal and cost effective. It really has a lot of good qualities. However, one thing I've learned is that while it takes on a lot of water, it actually looses it pretty fast. Difference bettween absorbing and holding. Organic matter is probably better at taking and holding. But it does take on some water, unlike many aggregates and it also has some of the properties of organic matter at the same time, and probably some extra. Just that it can grab nutrients as they travel through the pot in water and hold it for later is I think unique, or I doubt there are other cheap materials that will be found to equal it. Then there is just the biochar effect, whatever combination of properties makes it cause plants to grow better in many cases. It is great in cactus mixes. I use 50% or more, because you want lots of aggregate, but it has all those other properties.
Dunno, I'm sure someone is trying it, or will soon. I doubt on pure char, but growing them on a mix seems worth experimenting with. Not based on any theory, but just to see what happens. I've seen fungus colonize it very quickly after burning before. THey might be after the byproducts of combustion.
The plant has just really gotten well established this year. There are large plants right up against it slurping up resources, so when those come out and the plant gets full sized, I'll know more.
I don’t believe I could use charcoal since my soil ph is over 8 already. Wood ash at least is alkaline and will raise the ph even higher. But I do save scraps and burry them in my garden already.
SkillCult I did a little research and what I was able to find looked like charcoal didn’t have much of any affect on ph. Ash however will raise your ph. Anyways I had pruned my trees and last Friday converted all my prunings into charcoal with my double stacked 55 gallon barrel system. And I’m happy to report it worked quite well. I got more than 55gallons of charcoal in 6 hours with mostly all green wood. I used some pallet wood to get the heat started. I’m going to try to take a short video of my system the next time I fire it up so others can use this idea.
@@christophergruenwald5054 I've heard it said that there is a permanent shift up in ph, but I haven't really followed up. Ash is transient in that effect. Please let me know if you make that video. I"d like to see what you're doing. Thanks for reporting back.
I'd like to be totally convinced about biochar, but I have some queries. I notice in some of your other videos, that the charcoal actually migrates to the top of the soil after lots of watering or rain. Being so light and hollow, it is not surprising that this would occur. So really, isn't its tendency to be washed out of the soil with time, rather than to permanently improve It? Also, when I have had a bucket of ash and charcoal that sat out in the rain ... the light charcoal again, floated on top. So by what mechanism can it be "charged" in either solution or a wet compost etc? And how long can that "charging" possibly last? Surely, very soon, any elements taken up by the charcoal, would be exhausted? And only an inert drainage-improving place-holder would remain in the soil, if it was buried deep enough to escape being washed out again. Vast areas of Aussie bush that were cleared then had the stumps and limbs burnt off in massive windrows, before being ploughed & cropped, would surely have had vast quantities of charcoal incorporated into the soil. The effects on future tree crops are staggering, where they are growing on the rich deposit of potash-rich ash, in our generally phosphorus-deficient soil. But these soluble K+ salts are soon washed away or locked up in timber. I cannot recognise any ongoing advantage of the charcoal buried in the soil. Isn't it at least equally advantageous to soil structure and fertility, to add the carbon to the soil in the form of decaying lignin? Wood, that is. Yes, eventually it will decompose entirely and release some CO2 into the atmosphere ... but isn't that what we should really be doing? What is it about the term "Greenhouse gas" that terrifies people? Don't they ever connect it with this concept ... of a protected growing environment with an abundance of the nutrients required for healthy plant growth? The invisible but paramount ingredient in the greenhouse, is CO2, and water vapour which is actually the highest volume "greenhouse gas," is also essential. There is no magic about the number "300". Greenhouses which are hermetically sealed, at a CO2 level of 300 ppm, would quicklyhave all that growth-inducing CO2 absorbed by its plants, as soon as the sunlight shone on them. Greenhouse growing requires a source of incresing the CO2 level, from 300 ppm to at least 1,000 - 1,200 ppm. Plants produce their substance, carbohydrate, from CO2 and water. Without these, they die. The higher the CO2 level of the atmosphere, the more plants can grow, providing somebody plants more than they are cutting down. We cannot "green" the earth unless we maintain high atmospheric CO2 levels! What a conceited species man is, to imagine that an arbitrarily-set number should govern the percentage of CO2 in the entire earth's atmosphere! Forever! The fact is that temperatures were previously much warmer, water more abundant, and CO2 levels much higher, than they presently are, when the earth was more of a :"greenhouse," with much higher plant coverage and better rates of growth. Animals grew to much greater sizes. What is wrong with that? Plus, if I dug a big hole like this at my place (a flood plain), it would fill with water and create a foetid anaerobic sump with all that organic matter. Have you seen Joseph Jenkiins' many videos on his excellent compost toilet system? He is adamant about scooping a shallow hollow in the ground, adding a thick "biological sponge" of old organic material such as sawdust and weeds & straw inside a dedicated compost bin made of timber, then adding regular layers of toilet contents, garden weeds, kitchen waste, dead dogs and possums, meat scraps, innards, whatever. It is all reduced to compost at safe high temps within about 3 weeks. But it is all done above ground and above the water table so nothing undecomposed leaches into the soil. After a year from finishing each heap, it is safe to use on the garden. Jenkins has done amazing work in developing countries, with his compost toilet systems being sweet-smelling, fly-free, disease-proof and creating bulk usable compost, compared to the UN's stinking fly-infested chemical toilets. Worth looking through his playlist.
Well, the most important thing is not how it works, but that it works. It could be useful to know how it works of course and that could lead to better implementation, but it's vastly less important than the general results. If you look at the literature on terra pretta, the african dark earths and the stuff I dug up on 19th century use of charcoal in Europe and North America skillcult.com/blog/2012/05/18/some-citations-on-biochar-in-europe-and-america-in-the-19th-century, not to mention many modern examples, it is quite clear that it can work very well and that the effect is not transient. It is not safe to extrapolate that to every soil and every plant obviously, it is compelling enough that we should try it everywhere. Charcoal is extensively used to grab all kinds of stuff from nutrients to toxins. How, I don't care all that much and what exactly it holds that is of benefit to plants and how that all works I haven't been interested enough to do much research. Nitrogen for sure, but the rest I'm not sure. The benefit could be that it serves as a net to catch some of the stuff that would normally leach through the soil. Here we have high enough rainfall that leaching is a major problem. Ash is amazing for feeding plants here, but it is very transient. Some of the stuff should be staying, but it is quite obvious that the general effect is temporary. The decay prone organic matter carbon stuff like wood debris and compost is also very transient in the soil. I've been gardening here for 12 years, but if I walked away, the fertility of the garden soil would soon match that of the surrounding meadow. Yet, african dark earth is still more fertile 800 years later. The early American accounts talk about old charcoal pits being easily spotted by the lush growth decades later. That is not the effect of ash. You can't see anything where any of my old burn piles were. The other often touted theory is that it provides more microbe habitat. Whatever is going on in there, must be very complicated. At this point, the reason it works is of minimal interest to me. What interests me is getting in as many experiements as I can in my soil, with char made from my feedstock, the way I char it and see what happens. The rest will always be of less interest and is miles less important. If it continues to work well, then there will be something interesting to study. I don't understand the approach of coming at it the other way. Pot trials and myopic experiments have much less relevance to me than historical and physical evidence. Probably little charcoal was really added to the soil by clearing unless it was intentional. The default for clearing and slash and burn is to burn to ash to get rid of the bulk, and/or intentional ash production for short term fertility. It is a good way to grow a garden for a few years, but the fertility is transient, and then you have to go do it again elsewhere. Given the large quantities of char in the anthropogenic char soils, it is difficult to imagine them happening accidentally on any scale. Maybe with untold generations of sloppy slash and burn, but the goal is usually ash for crops. There is a huge production difference in charcoal if you actually lean toward optimization of char production. As far as greenhouse gasses go, I don't have a lot of strong opinions and I think there are too many unwarranted strong opinions. It seems very unlikely that the effect is not real. Scientists were talking about it when I was a kid and now the climate has gone all wonky. It takes a religious like conviction to believe that is just a coincidence. Like all issues, there is a lot of people on both sides just believing what they want to believe and not thinking very much. You might know a lot more than me about it, but it's my understanding that CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, but it gets the most press and it is the one that can be drawn down and sequestered as far as I know. It provides a rallying point. Burning mass amounts of fossil fuels has other negative effects from global conflict to other types of pollution and we should curb that shit. That should be obvious to anyone. The reason people are freaking out is that a major climate shift is probably going to be devastating to humans and temporarily to environments as they are now. It's already annoying to me and may even have serious consequences before I'm dead. People think of nature as relatively static and to be conserved as is as if there is some perfect nature masterplan. The masterplan is actually adaptation. On the other hand to cavalierly say that nothing matters because nature will adapt and we should run rough shod over everything is a gross and retarded point of view. We do have very, very old naturally evolved ecologies in place that have evolved check and balances and unique species and are amazing and beautiful. There is all kinds of chaos afoot because of human intervention. Human initiated climate change is just a really broad brush stroke. In the long run, regarding CO2 specifically, I'm pretty much inclined to agree with you, which almost always gets either deer in the headlights looks from one side and some ignorant faith based spittle laced crap from the other. I generally avoid discussing it very often because people are so crazy. I'm generally interested in CO2 and the idea that life evolved in a higher CO2 environment. I've even thought of trying to create artificially co2 boosted environments as a health experiment. I also try to breath as little as possible to increase CO2 retention ala Buteyko. We'll all be hearing more about the important physiologic usefulness of CO2 soon. But does that mean we should dump tons of it into the atmosphere, changing the climate and causing a period of mass adaptation? I actually think that is a question worth asking, but not an idea to approach in a cavalier manner. One thing for sure, a large climate shift will be inconvenient for humans and ecologies as they currently are in the short run. Also, It will shift again eventually. If a big hole like this would turn into a foetid cess pool, you should probably do something else. Depending on resources, pits could still be used during the dry season in most places. Here it would take incredible amounts of rain to create long standing water in this pit, but that's in my soil. This would probaby work most places I've lived. three are other options, like some type of mound system using above ground layering. The concept is simple, failure to implement because a pit will fill with water or drown somone's chihuahua seems like a failure of creativity more than a hard limit. I've never liked the Jenkins system. I've seen people try to implement it for the last 25 years or more and it is rarely well maintained as outlined in the book. It requires frequent maintenance involving handing and manually washing out shit buckets, and it requires a huge quantity of organic matter. If i recall right, he talks about importing sawdust by the dump truck load. Then it has to be carefully composted in a specific way. It seems like an inelegant system and I've personally never seen it run well, though I've seen it run very poorly. That is understandable, since it is not very convenient. In my zone here, pit latrines are okay, but this system could be awesome in the right context. As long as the goal is permanent soil building and the motivation is there to keep digging holes, it seems pretty awesome. If the goal is to dispose of "waste", then not so much. The infrastructure could be a problem though. Pooping in a hole and immediately covering it over permanently, never to been seen, smelled or touched again is pretty appealing, add leaving an engineered super soil behind that could last for millennia and that is pretty cool. The permanent stationary system I'm most interested in is the urine diverting EcoSan system which uses wood ashes and desiccation over a long period of time. It requires extremely low maintenance and diverts the urine for independent use as an easily applied soluble fertilizer, which I've been all about for years. I would probably add a solar oven effect in the system to insure sterility, but overall, it looks pretty great. It is above ground, so there is no issue with flooding or groundwater contamination where that is likely to be a problem. It does require adequate amounts of ash, but that is not a problem anywhere I've lived. There is very little maintenance besides cleaning it out when it's finished drying and aging. it is a dry system and the ash assists in sanitation. I haven't used it, so I don't know what the realities are, but it looks much better on paper than the humanure system by a huge margin.
Thanks for the lengthy response! I shall read & digest. Making charcoal sure sounds like fun, but I don't usually have wood to spare. In the meantime, I have discovered that my 2 retired horses, confined on small patches of fairly worthless herbage, are churning out over 1 cubic metrre of scrumptious-looking poop per week! Am gathering this up to layer thickly on my poor soil beneath old woodchips, chicken droppings, scythed weeds, etc. Hopefully this will convert large beds of inert soil to a thriving microcosm of living earth over the coming winter.
It's the climate. 6 months of drought leaves no useable water in the top layers of soil for many months. If there is any benefit to soil modification it has to extend deeply. Also, both the terra preta and african dark earth soils are up to 2 meters deep. Whether they were created that way or the stuff sifted gradually into the lower soil horizons I'm not sure. I'll eventually be testing the efficacy of shallower and deeper applications, but for now I'm using the working assumption that over two feet deep is going to be best for deep rooted perennials and trees. There are other potential benefits I think, but only time and testing will shed much light on any of it as far as how it all plays out in real life. My real interest though is in deep soil modification to mimic something closer to deep fertile valley and flood plain soils. My conception of those is that they are not extra fertile because the top 12 inches are super fertile, but because the soils are both rich and deep.
The sheer scale of the Tera Preta boggles the mind. Just the many foot deep mass of char, and the amount of wood burned, crushed is immense. Then again, almost everything ancient peoples did boggles the mind...
when I think about the amount I've made by myself in a few years it starts to make sense when you think about sedentary cultures with large populations cooking on open fires and probably charring everything else. Tropics grow a lot of biomass. But yeah, it's something else to think about all that human activity leaving such a large permanent effect. I trip out frequently on the amazing things people have done that are already fallen to pieces. Now we have so much power and so many resources and tools at our disposal and people think it's amazing if you build a crappy shed. A friend of mine just told me he's made 120 yards of biochar in the last couple years.
They’re finding bio char everywhere down there in the Amazon it’s basically one big food forest
Hi Josh, I started blacksmithing a little and told my friend and said those ancient blacksmiths could do great stuff. He said, "yeah, well what else did they have to do?" That gave me a chuckle.
Like the cathedrals and other buildings all over this realm
I use charcoal as a natural barrier against disease on tree wounds
either roots or branch pruning . I have transplanted large trees by hand
that I believe would have rotted and died if I hadn't used it.
All you do is rub the charcoal onto the wound until it's completely black.
I have a 60 year old wisteria that was ripped out the ground by a
machine and said to the worker can I have it thinking that it had little
chance of surviving but after I had re cut the torn roots and limbs
I applied the charcoal to the wounds and it's still alive 3 years later.
Is only because I tried it and gave it a chance it's alive today.
Very cool, I'll remember that when I move some large olive and apple trees that I need to relocate.
For really small scale, saliva also work quite well. Our saliva is a natural disinfectant. Although for obvious reason can't be used in large scale. ;-)
Cheers
I love the look of wisteria, I hate the care needed to keep wisteria within bounds. Also, I think it's next to impossible to kill, even if you wanted to. It redefines 'tenacious'.
Pit planting definitely works. I dumped piles of mulched tree leaves, weeds, compost, sifted soil and woodstove charcoal/ash into a large garbage can shaped hole for my Puget Gold Apricot tree before I planted it. Reason being is I live on an ancient Fraser River gravel bar where the soil is poor and consists of 20% rocks and has a high clay content. There's head sized river boulders 2 feet below the top soil and they only get larger as I dig deeper. Trees and deep rooted plants have a hard time getting established in the rocky clay soil. I notice that the Frost Peach I planted without such a deep pit is not fairing as well. The Apricot is a monster and should start to produce this Spring in it's fourth year. I've been pruning it quite a lot to control the limb size and shape of the tree. The drought resistance of the tree is also incredible since I imagine quite a spongy soil collects moisture from the surrounding clay.
This channel is one of my absolute favourites. You're a pioneer.
Thanks!
Wholly agree..a new video notification means an instant view. Great stuff
I like his channel so much I’m happy when I see a video I’ve never seen before in my feed lol
Simplicity, patience, compassion. thank you for your knowing the ledge and sharing
The theory of the tera petra is that the tribes were creating biochar to use in compost toilets. The pots were used as toilets, and the biochar was spread over the excrement to control the smell (similar to how we use woodchips). When the pots were full they were emptied into pits. If the pots were in bad shape they were just tossed into the pits too.
really appreciate the talk about how our language effects how we interpret value at the beginning of the video
Jared Diamond has written several books on ancient civilizations and how they were able to thrive or not. A collection pit has been part of many an ancient societies .
You have inspired me the other day in "don't burn your brush" I was just going to Hoogle garden it but then it occurred to me to make bio char. My brother then asked me what does bio char do? That's when I came in and dug through the UA-cam videos on bio char. Your video included. I am so impressed with it that I am now processing my branches that saw off to remove ladder fuels in my Forest. Thank you for your diligence in sharing.
Hopefully your results will be as good as mine and a lot of others, but only one way to find out. i've made lots of it from ladder fuels and a lot of the trees I trimmed to head height 10 years ago need trimming again.
I like the term Bichar Catch Pit.
Persistence is everything! I moved into my current place 5 years ago with a backyard not much more than a sand long jump pit, 8x20 foot. In the summer neighborhood cats used it as a litter box and in the spring stinging nettles covered everything. After composting, woodchip layers, and the occasional dump of charcoal and ashes from a BBQ there is a garden the next inhabitants will take over. I never planned to stay here long, but my gardening thumbs were itching and now I have a successfully rooted grapevine, rosemary, and two lavender bushes. After some trial and error, I realized giant sunflowers could send roots deep enough to pull nutrients from far underground, and regularly have a sunflower forest come midsummer.
Good for you. I've improved things wherever I've lived.
I've read about the terra preta pits in the Amazon, and I agree with you, they're obviously deliberate. They say that the soil contains not only charcoal, but also bits and pieces of pottery, which many believe proves that the pits were just old garbage middens. But what if the clay pots where just the method the locals used for creating and introducing the char into the soil? Take a simple unglazed pot and stuff it full of bio material, then seal a lid with a small hole in the top to allow wood gas to escape, then toss it into the evening cooking fire and you've got a pot full of bio char. Don't bother emptying it, just toss it into the old garden pit and break it open with a stick, then mix it with some regular soil and maybe some fertilizer or mulch, and you've got terra preta. I wonder if anybody ever tried piecing those potshards together to see just what kind of pots they really were?
I wonder if there is any evidence of them being actual pits v.s. middens. It might not matter too much either way, as the effect may eventually be similar. I would guess that char was made with similar open methods with piles or pits to what I use, or in piles and pits covered with earth. Clay pots might work, but even a quick clay pot of any size is a bunch of work. Pottery societies always have a steady stream of broken pots. Given the large areas covered and the percentages of charcoal, it seems unlikely that it was random. Even if they were middens, it's hard to believe that it wasn't systematic and that the char wasn't produced intentionally. Hopefully more information will come out about the methodology of'African Dark Earths. I haven't look in a while, but when that stuff was first published there didn't seem to be anything about how the char was made and how materials were applied.
@@SkillCult I realize this is a very old comment but can't help myself.
What if they were old trash pits that were burnt every so often to lower the level?
I'm sure it was difficult to dig that large of a pit back then. Maybe as they began to fill up they were set a flame to drop the height of the fill. Not everything would burn completely. Then more was added on top etc, etc.
After a few iterations of this I feel certain the people would notice plants growing more vigorously on the old pits and connect the dots on planting above old trash pits.
"Good for everybody, and everything, for all the time, indefinitely." 🤣❤🙏 love the mindset
Love your videos Steven. Your comments regarding our current wording on typical 'waste' are especially thoughtful, it's something that can't be emphasized enough. Our current language and connotations around it really do need an overhaul.
Yes, it's hard to talk about that stuff at all without defining terms or spelling it all out. Sometimes that's better anyway since words don't mean the same thing to everyone, but it's inconvenient.
That's my general idea as well, it may take more time to spell it out, but we have plenty of time so why not the extra few minutes. Might just leave a lasting change in ideas.
Communicating with words is fraught with danger in the first place. I'm a fan of remembering that words are not things and only so many assumptions can be made about what they mean to other people. we have to be careful of what they mean to us too and how language and cultural meaning limit our perception and thought. I think the deepest phenomena of intuitive thinking probably transcend language, but most of us think in our personal interpretation of our language, which is coded with extreme bias. People like buzz words and phrases that are supposed to hold some common meaning. It saves a lot of time but results in a lot of very shallow conversations and potential for miscommunication. So, I think it's very good to talk some stuff out in more specific terms to define what exactly we are talking about and help define and refine our own understanding. But, simple words that have a common meaning are essential for easy rapid communication too and we need a terminology for end of use items or soil food or whatever that stuff I was talking about is, because that's what we'll use 95% of the time. But we definitely don't talk stuff out enough and I think we should do so every once in a while at least.
That is a fantastic description of a real complex process.
Its interesting that you mention simple words because i spent a solid 5 minutes trying to think of one for all currently viewed waste before submitting and putting quotations around the word. I do like soil food though, not what it was but what it will become.
I detest the terms 'green' or 'earth friendly' because they have become exactly that, a shell of their original intent and a means to market certain styles of products. The ideas those terms were supposed to embody are almost lost in the soothing light green packaging.
Or mention Capitalism and Communism and suddenly there is a polar split in thinking and everybody is arguing even though they are just different methods of supposedly looking after a population, both with positives and negatives. The words have instilled in them meaning more then is in any dictionary, they invoke certain feelings.
One of my former lecturers often said that if your told that something (be it words, ideas or structures ) has always "just been" then that is really what you should be having a look at more closely. These ideas and words haven't always existed they were created for a reason and that purpose can change over time and the word or idea with it.
It's often forgotten that if a definition no longer suits then they can be altered or superseded.
Thank you for taking the time to share all your knowledge with us - it's much appreciated! I feel particularly passionate about the potential of biochar and it makes me sad that I can't share my excitement with most of my friends since I know they wouldn't understand it... Keep up your good work - the followers will come!
Almost everyone I know that should be doing biochar still is not, or just barely dabbling with it. Most people are followers. I've been thinking a lot about that today and how even in the circles that should jump right in, everyone waits for someone else to get on the dance floor. I want to package this idea in a way that will give the illusion of legitimacy and assuage whatever it is that keeps people from acting.
Impressively simple yet effective. Zero waste is the way to go. Make soil to make food is common sense. I appreciate your common sense. Thank you for your video.
I couldn't agree more! Just think of how many toxic algae blooms could be avoided, if we stopped using chemical fertilisers, that leach through the soil and into the waterways. I grew up in NE Iowa, and have noted that when I was a kid, the soil in the fields was almost black. Now it all looks like clay.
charcoal may trap some soluble nutrients and prevent them from being washed through. I'm sure there is at least some published research on that.
Robert Rodale's vision lives on in the sustainability realm...
Found you by happenstance. Subscribed.
I love this. this kind of incremental approach can be really powerful. It makes me think of the shell middens which have been found to be meters deep and kilometers long (except this is useful). Tiny actions add up for good or ill.
Yes, it's so true. I've really noticed how some things seem impossible if you sit around doing the math, but then they just happen if you start plugging away slowly.
I'm gonna' try this in out yard and hope my Thai neighbors show some interest in it. So much brush gets burnt here every year and the soil is SO poor. Our soil is just red,iron oxide,no Humus. Weeds hardly can grow on it.
I have a keyhole and a couple of hugels. Never used biochar, I didn''t realize how long the charcoal lasted. I love your attitude on animals.
Best channel on youtube by far
Great idea. IM doing something simular. I can't make a hole. the home owners group would get me..lol. But I am making char, mixing it with worm castings, scraps from fish i catch and fellet, cuttings from my kitchen. Once full. I let it sit for six months and then blend it into my garden. I jsut started, so donlt have results yet, I knw that the fisj guts are helpful . Iuse to burry them in the grass of the yard with a post hole digger. The grass always grew better. Look forward to seeing your garden do awesome. Thanks for sharing.
The one thing I'd encourage is keeping track of how much you put here and doing minimum percentages. Better yet, install different percentages adjacent to each other to compare. If you spread it too randomly or in too small quantities, you'll fail to realize a large effect.
You could call your catch pile a "Midden" pile, which is a pile of kitchen waste. The term is often associated with sea food shells, but it also means any organic kitchen waste and even human poop.
That's a pretty good idea. I'm familiar with the term and phenomenon. Midden pit maybe. It doesn't really communicate intention or purpose other than disposal. Thanks for the idea.
I call it organic material and it's literal gold.
Absolutely love this. There are great people doing research in this field, trying to figure out how to make a carbon negative way of producing biochar and improving soils at the same time. It is quite possible that this could be the way that we as a whole could make it work. Creating proper biochar at the scientific level is a little more complex in trying to get a clean burn and reaching the proper temperatures to get a proper PH at the end product, but it is definitely doable. In some African countries, they use a stove that uses a process to make biochar while they are cooking food. That might be an awesome way to do it for the home user.
As for my urban farm in my back yard, I am super excited about implementing this as I have very poor sandy soil. All the research points to the idea that I will have drastic improvements in my soil with this type of method. Super excited!
Thanks for sharing. Would love an update!
I just use open burn methods that are really easy. All process freeze some carbon. The problem for most is accessibility, not perfect char. When I stopped worrying about the people telling me it had to be made a certain way, I produced a couple thousand gallons of the stuff and counting. Iv'e done a bunch of pits and trenches now. These artichoke pits I can't really judge until the plants are established and the old plants are removed completely to reduce competition.
@@SkillCult Most of my business has been built on the idea that something is better than nothing and that something can always be better. It allows me the freedom to try something and to get things moving while still allowing me the flexibility to experiment and make things better as I go on.
Been down the rabbit hole a bit and love that there is actual research on the higher level trying to make this 100% carbon neutral / carbon negative. So, that's just something neat.
As for your channel, Thanks for all the varied content. I've only just been gardening for a year now (started April last year) and your playlist on pruning was enlightening and a great watch. Totally love the multi-year experiments and examples!
It is nice for Farms and Homestead ! Thanks for the information and skills!
Just discovered your channel today.... and subscribed after watching a few videos. Awesome stuff, and thanks for sharing. Just bought a house 2 years ago and have been gradually adding and expanding our garden ever since. Can't wait to experiment with your techniques.
And I'm a big fan of biochar - been adding it to my soil since day one. We had to clear a bunch of trees to create a sunny garden spot and all of the limbs / brush were burned and added back to the soil as we went (And I got 5 cords of firewood, too!)
Can't wait to see your future posts
Cool. Welcome to the channel. I've got plenty more in store for sure. Way to be proactive on the biochar. It actually took me a couple years to really get started, but I've made quite a bit in a short time. Always want more though. Scorched earth policy lol. I'm all about these pits. I just have one all the time now slowly filling up with whatever.
Because of the soil quality in my garden I absolutely had to add something, so I began with leaves, grass clippings and biochar immediately upon moving in.... a year before we started actually began digging beds / adding fencing
We have only about 2" of poor top soil over a clay / boulder mix. You should see the wonderful Mayan pyramid we're building from the rocks we've removed from our very modestly sized garden.
I think I'm going to try your catch pit on the area we'd like to expand to next. With all of the oaks / maples in my yard I get somewhere around 30+ yards of leaves from the front yard each fall. I think layering that with compost, biochar, grass clippings and other crap will have a great impact (after removing 10,000 rocks, of course). Thanks again!
a lot of wisdom in every single video; many thanks for sharing.
Love your philosophy of legacy. Well said.
Hi, I am Jaime from Chile. Dude I think you are the closest to actually making Terra Preta, but I think you should meke it in a drum. The Amazonian Indians needed big pieces of charcoal for their pottery kilns so their open trenches were quite deep so they could put in bigger logs. Since the trenches were dug in clay so with heat generated with making the charcoal and the steam after the process the clay would end up getting cooked and so they would hold water. So they were making anaerobic compost. Every time they would dump stuf in the trench they wold add dirt to stop the flies and to stop the smell they would throw small pieces of charcoal unsuitable for their kilns.
I wold put a lid on the drum at the end, the Indians I'm pretty sure they wold cap these trenches with more clay before the rainy season so the excess water would run off ... So I would Also put a spigot at the bottom to make it drip... Clay holds water but it does sweat. Anyway I hope your experiments keep giving you success stories
Organic pit is freaking amazing burnt or not. Plus the extra dirt can be used in raised gardens, or to level bumps in the terrain.
_Diggy diggy hole, I'm digging a hole!_
You put words to what I have been doing and preaching for years.
Soil is the black gold of the melinium...
Nutrition banking...
I like Nutrition Banking. I've been refering to the pits as catch pits. I like that too. Anyway, it just makes sense right? I've got two of these artichoke pits and working on filling the third circular tree pit. Over the next ten to twenty years, we'll see how they do.
SkillCult I just ordered 2 packs of your leek seed to Gresham Oregon.
In the link below we discuss nutrition banking on a old logging pile full of stumps. Check it out.
hummingbirdhavennw.blogspot.fi/?m=1
Thanks, I'll try to check it out. Seeds are in the mail!
lol You and I are kindred spirits. I used to have 126 apples on M9 rootstock, 6 pears on OldHome, but they each had another 8 grafts on each. 6 Cherries on Gisele 5, 3 peaches 1 Nectarine and 6 plum all on St.Julien. I also had 3 apples on M26. Every day,I pissed my way around the orchard. Lots of goodies in our urine for plants to absorb. Biochar is a great idea too. I'm def going to add that to my plant feeding system in the near future.
Yeah, I'm just about out of room for more apple grafts. The only thing that might save me is that I'm ready to start cutting stuff out and replacing it! I'm happy to see that people are catching on to urine as a fertilizer. I'd like to promote it as much as possible. It contains most of the plant nutrients leaving our bodies and not using it is like strip mining our soils and then systematically flushing that fertility into the ocean.
My dad and I think we have a system to keep rodents out. We're clearing out a large plot of the land and going to put an fence up around the perimeter of the property that the dogs can run around in. Then put a fence up around the garden inside the yard to keep the dogs out. We haven't put it into application yet, but that's the initial idea. Everything should be operational by next summer hopefully, and I'll be making a point to make charcoal now instead of just ash while we clear out the yard of the dying ash trees.
Don’t you just hear about Terra Preta and know it is the real deal? I have buried my kitchen scraps in the ground and watched trees thrive, and this is even better. I’m a 70 year old woman in a trailer park so it won’t take that long to do my whole yard! Thank you!
There are more and more of these modified char soils coming to light as well. African dark earth is a major one.
I'm so jealous of your soil! I'm living on limestone bedrock with less than 1/2 inch of native soil :(
Burn some lime. I do have soil, though it isn't naturally very fertile, it;s not bad by any means and it is a good base to work from. I got lucky. Most of my neighbors have clay soil, very heavy.
I had to watch this twice because the first time around, I kept getting distracted by all the birds! I'm jealous. It must be awesome to have an eagle for a neighbor. I'm making the necessary changes to invite them into my yard, but it's slow going. Thanks for the info! Can't wait until fall when I can start fires without getting fined.
Awesome!
I had the exact same idea ages ago, it makes so much sense. Love your videos, keep up the amazing work.
Awesome. I find myself thinking why haven't I been doing this forever! Of course I didn't know about the charcoal thing though. that's a game changer.
+SkillCult yeah, thats where i was stumped, like seriously. The earth is a recycling plant, people throw stuff out they shouldn't. As you said they're valuable resources.
When i finally get the chance to i'll give it a go and tell you if it works in Australia with the resources i have available here.
You know, experimentation and sharing information is how the world grows.
Yeah, would love to hear any long term feedback. It's definitely a very long term project. Because of the very uncontrolled nature of it, it will be a decade or more till skeptical people are going to be convinced of anything, which is as it should be. I'm tempted to set up some side by side trials using equivalent inputs aside from charcoal.
+SkillCult don't worry, people are skeptical of anything new or that can help them. Its human nature. As you said, its up to us. Lets do this!
@@alicestiener556- For what it's worth. Here goes a tip.
Make your digging, compost heap, etc. on a "high" spot. Anything leaching from it will automatically and surely fertilize downstream. So a lot more area can be easily covered, without further input. ;-)
Note of caution: DO NOT do it close to a water source, stream, pond, well, or on high water table. Particularly if using "diseased" components. Certainly there's a big difference between burying the carcass of a canary or a cow! Some common sense is useful here. LOL ;-)
With this said, given the right conditions it should be a social obligation to do so. ;-)
Cheers
I like this a lot. A simple railing would be good because it's easy to fall or trip into a hole like that.
Agreed, not good for babies, newts, mice, lizards and toy dogs.
Maybe a 4'x4' plywood cover. I would want to throw a dead hen (e.g.) in there and I would need to keep my dogs out.
Beautiful soil!
It isn't very fertile, but it really is an excellent base to work with.
I love the tilt-shifting you did on the time lapse!
It's actually a sony camera style setting called miniature. it blurs out the top and bottom thirds and hypersaturates the colors. It's fun.
Keep up the good work
Good stuff. I am going to integrate this idea into my life. Thank you.
Excellent!
Any new updates on this technique? I'm doing something similar, both based on what I saw you doing and my own research on terra preta. I'm looking forward to seeing how my own experiments go, but I'd love an update on yours.
To answer my own question...
From 2019: ua-cam.com/video/x63VOAFIA3c/v-deo.html
Not the same artichoke/pit, but still a good view.
If someone were starting a new garden and they needed to clear weeds, could they spread charcoal onto the weeds and just wait a year for the charcoal to innoculate itself at the expense of the weeds? Kill two birds with one stone?
I dont' think it would stop the weeds. Sitting around might help some with precharging it though. hard to say. I just add extra fertilizer and stuff when I dig it in.
I had always heard that it was a bad idea to add meat to a compost. Can you expand on that please?
(Love your videos. Thank you.)
I don't worry about it personally. if you put a lot in, it can cause problems, but it's just food and it rots. I think people think that it the organisms it will grow can be dangerous, but I doubt that's a really legitimate problem.
Any update to this video? How is that plant doing? Did you end up doing two more? I looked but didn't see a video. Thanks for the information and entertainment!
Not really. I plan to remove the one next to it this year to let this one grow. Once it's down to one row of plants and they have had time to settle in, I can make some comparisons.
If ur in town and ur doing this on a small scale you can infact get royal oak lump charcoal which is essentially oragnic charcoal with vegtable meal you can easily buy a bag for close to 8 bucks and bring it home and soak in compost and water or urine fishemulsion whatever
Yes!
@@SkillCult i am tottaly immersed in biochar just the science and evidence tgat backs how carbon negative and amazing charcoal is. The surface of a gram is 9000 sq feet its just insane its like lil bacteria condos..i can just dream of the different ways you can manipulate this resource to create fertility like imagine what kind of knf experiments you can cook up and put into charcoal. I was curious of the capacity it might have to carry fungis and if i could innoculate it with wine cap and put it in a straw bed. How can i take it and essentially charge it with some high cellulose material or wrotting grain sprouts so i can get mushrooms to run through it. I dunno but i might try it.
Earthworms can penetrate the charcoal soil barrier? Or prefer to evade?
Someone I knew who like Thomas Alva Edison, went to the extremes. He said to me his soil mixture by volume of 40% activated carbon or charcoal powder, 5% limestone rock dust, 5% gypsum rock dust, 40% composite rock dust mixtures, and 10% inocculated compost-humus or 10% inocculated peat. Simultaneously mixed together while being sprayed by a water mister to simultaneously moisten it (NOT WET IT) and to prevent dusts from being emitted during the mixing-blending process. Then he started using a stanless steel mesh pot lined with geotexttile fabric to get advantage also of the air pruning effect. I wonder what are the results that he has gotten?
Results, lot's of work and lots of money spent.
Strange connection, but Steven I think you look a bit like Shannon Larratt (and have a similar temperament (which is good!)).
I had never heard of him before.
You mentioned getting clippings and waste from the city. My question is would there be any effect from the chemicals they use on said clippings? Or would it simply be burned off during the creation of the biochar?
I wouldn't know. But in a paradigm that made sense, like one where we charred a lot of that stuff, they would probably be in less frequent use.
1:39 I'd say Black Gold describes it well 🤗
they (the terra petra buiders) used to put their night waste/trash/etc into clay pots, cover it with charcoal and ash to hide the smell. when full they would chuck it into the pit. that is the reason there are pottery shards in the pit. The charcoal is innoculated with the feces bacteria (same as innoculating with worm castings or compost tea), the pottery shards provide another biome for beneficial life. I do not think they understood what the benefits were, but knew that it worked. While crapping in a pot doesnt sound appealing today you can do essentially the same thing with innoculated charcoal and another porous matieral (small pumice stones or pottery if you can find it).
As someone who has made some primitive pottery that scenario is impossible to believe. I mean if you are saying that the pots were essentially disposable. I've little doubt that human excrement was part of the system though. Cultures that use clay pots every day, break them all the time, especially soft fired primitive pottery that is frequently used on open flames. So, over time, a lot of clay sherds would accumulate. I don't think that trash piles, v.s. pits is at all hard to believe either. Digging without metal tools is a bunch of work. But if it's for large scale pernanent soil improvement it is not infeasible in the least.
Absolutely, although I do not know much about pottery. The refuse, and perhaps some other form of night soil container (wood?) probably was used. I am not an expert in any of this, but I do know that charcoal needs to be charged with beneficial bacteria, either purposely or by an indirect means. the refuse pits probably got feces, trash, biomass, pottery, and everything else. Maybe they burned the pits occasionally to clean up a bit. Anyways, my only point was the need to charge the charcoal, and offered my ideas on it from what I have read and watched. Groovy and good luck!
@@mikeb5748 It does seem to make sense that they just threw everything in there. Only part I would have reason to question is disposable pottery. I definitely like the idea that char could be burned in the pits, either by open flash burns like I do in trenches, or even covered and smothered with dirt in slow burns like traditional charcoal methods do. Likely there was some variation as well. Cheers.
love the concept but do roots really go down that deep for most crops? i mean there are definitely deep rooted crops but most dont go deeper then 2 feet.
Here they certainly do. We have long dry summers and anything that lives through the summer goes quite deep. Elsewhere the effect may be more surface. Hard to say without a lot of testing. I'm on the working assumption that deeper is better, but largely influenced by my climate.
Im learning about growing with char but i clicked because i like the dreads haha. I have the same hairstyle minus the dreads.
P.s. you have great hilly land to try geoff lawson's permaculture systems!!
@Jeff Clark I'm in Appalachia and interested in any pointers I can get growing sustainable food on steep hillsides
Do u have links about growing on hilly land?
I love your spirit.
wow at the leeks in the background! You can easily see the size differences from there!
6:00
yeah, that bed is like a graph basically except it starts sloping back down on the 10% end. It might just be the usual problem of things not growing as well at the ends of beds, not sure. I'm actually pretty surprised that they are so big given that I put them in late and didn't get them fertilized and mulched for quite a while. That bed is only amended to 10 or 12 inches too. All the new stuff I'm doing to 2 feet or more.
Fine, you’ve convinced me
precursor challenge - no possible way I can get past, 1.5 ft = bedrock hardcore stuff down there.
challenge #1- growing food
challenge #2 - eating and preserving all the food.
Awesome. Any idea if the decomposition will produce much methane? I think compost piles that are not turned produce methane, which causes climate damage. Do you think this does, too?
It might, but I would look into whether the char absorbs it, because it may very well.
So cool.....Your best video to date! Such a simple, intelligent and beneficial thing to do!
Going to back yard to dig a hole!
Yes, dig a hole! :)
I wish I had all the rocks and clay you just dug out of the hole. Being facetious, my soil is 90% rock and clay.
I'm curious if we could get a quick update on this sometime this year maybe?
THere's not a lot to report. I have two of them going, but I havne't cut out the old plants next to them, which have tapped into the pits and are bigger than ever. One prodcued over 75 artichokes last year. I might take them out after this season and then we'll see how the others do. It takes a while for the plants to become really established in order to compare to the plants near them. Then we'll have something to look at. I'll keep in mind dropping it in a day on the homestead video sometime.
@skillcult new sub to channel I'm in the Appalachian mts stoked to see your in a hilly region at least
Welcome. similarities might end there lol. But any of us in mountain areas tend to have thin soils unless in a bottom of some kind. Our mountains are a whole lot younger so the number and depth of bottom lands is much less. The "holler" effect is a lot less. My soil is actually awesome compared to other areas here and relatively deep, but still not very fertile. I asked a friend growing potatoes in an alluvial plain in a larger valley here what she fertilized them with and she said "nothing, it's bottom land". That's beyond my experience here. Soil here is a substrate to work with and add things to in order to grow anything much.
@@SkillCult regardless I feel we may be able to help eachother w tips or possibly exchanging heirloom seeds..
I sent ya an email brother lets talk
@@SkillCult I signed up for newsletter on the site would you consider corresponding thru email or by phone or discord by chance?
You still around ? I haven’t seen anything from you in a long while
Very nice idea and great message.
But I don't totally agree with your method, because how do you prevent anaerobic conditions from ocurring inside the hole? Do the animals that scavenge and dig in it provide enough aeration? Because worms, insects and fine first plant roots don't really like anaerobic conditions.A farmer I know told me about an experiment where they put a layer of straw (maybe half a meter thick) inside a huge trench about a meter deep and filled it up with dirt. After three years they dug it up and the straw was nearly unchanged and pretty much compacted, no worms where found and no root developement down to the straw. With your system the risk of compacting are much smaller than on a full scale farm but still there, especially because you seem to have quite heavy clay soil.
Also I think the people in south america did just layer their waste material and charcoal over hundreds or thousands of years continually planting and letting animals till it. Digging like you did is quite energy intensive but probably the quickest way as we don't have generations of people layering for us.
I just don't worry about that. We'll see how the plants grow, but I think it will be be very well. Also, I'm not burying just straw, I've got lots of nitrogen in there. if it stalls it will only be in the short term. Any other approach I can think of would just add more work, like precomposting everything and then adding it for instance. Even if it took a year to be ready, I'd still probably do it this way just because it's easy and convenient. It's a long term project. But I think it will do well pretty much as soon as it's done. In this pit I'm adding tons of kitchen waste because I get a lot of it from a local resort and am looking for ways to use it. It should be a good test. There is so much of it in there that it will take a while to rot down and settle enough to even really finish backfilling. So, we'll see how it goes with that and how the one I put in last year with the new artichoke does. It either works or it doesn't but keeping it simple is important for my goals and the whole system the way I conceive of it.
Out of curiosity, what kinds of food waste should Not be placed in the catch pits?
I don't think any I can think of..
"Recycling" may be a good word (I'm not a native speaker of English so I don't really know if it fits perfectly)
Hello just watched this video today. Is there an update?
not yet. That plant keeps getting munched by gophers and hit pretty hard this year. I also still have not removed the gigantic one right next to it and I think that is just dominating the root zone. I'll probably cut it out this year.
Hope you haven't already answered this, but have you started such pits as charcoal trenches, or would that damage the soil life too much?
I wouldn't worry about that at all. The only thing I might do is break up the soil afterward in case if fired hard enough to form a hard layer. I've burned in the trenches both before and when partly full. I think it's fine to burn layers as you progress to add char.
Does the biochar prevent the smell of your gut piles from coming out? Where I live any gut pile not buried at least 4' deep and covered right away will have bears, and other animals pull the gut pile out within a week.
It can help, especially if you use a lot, but animals have a pretty keen sense of smell. But it's known for absorbing odors. For bears, electric fence, everything else I just tolerate, except dogs.
@@SkillCult Yeah that makes sense, as it's part of the nature cycle of things to let smaller animals take away these carcasses. Thanks for your videos and all the information you're a legend my brother
@@SkillCult question... I work construction and see houses and buildings get dug into virgin soil and a lot of nails, and other materials get buried with the house after completion (it's a lot better than it was years ago but we still leave the ground worse than we found it). Now do you think adding a percentage of biochar to the ground filling stage of construction like in your trench it would have a positive effect on the environment and peoples lawns and help make cities less of an environmental issue?
hi mr Skillcult greetings from ibiza , first I want thank you for all the really good tips and info you provide in your channel, because you axe info I got my first axe (2.5 pounds head) some months ago instead of buying saw like the silky ones tipe, and I am super happy with my decission. About this video, I would like to ask you about bokashi technique ( it is suposed to provide 100% natural soil fertilizer in about 2-4 weeks), and your opinion about it?.(sorry for my english, catalan is mother language). have a nice day
I have not used it, but it's a neat idea. I'm inclined toward the Korean Natural Farming microbe culture techniques. They use whatever the local soil organisms for the forest are. I still have not messed with it, though I've made a lot of random compost and manure teas. Too many things to try, not enough time! Oh, but I do put forest duff into these pits for microbes. If I did anything more, it would probably be to make tea from weeds, manure and decayed leaves from the forest, but i probably won't get to it.
That's better soil to start with, than here in the desert of El Paso.
Inspiring!
ooh tilt shift - fancy!
That's actually a style setting that sony has for timelapses called miniature. It shifts and hypersaturates colors and blurs the top and bottom of the image. It's fun. I do have a lensbaby tiltshift lens that I found in a thrift store, but I have hardly used it.
Great video Steven, couple of questions. I have watched at least some of your biochar videos before, but cannot remember if you process/sort the char for different things or is it all directed towards soil amending? Do you sort out the big stuff for blacksmithing for example? Also, with reference to adding carcasses and gut piles, you've mentioned your bear situation before. Don't the bears home in on a gut pile in the catchpit? Even if its under a layer of biochar and soil? We have a healthy bear population and very healthy coyote population, which I try not to attract too close. We don't live as close to the edge of the woodland as you seem to, approximately 100+ yards of open hayfield separate us, which has seemed so far to be too open cover for the bears to traverse.
I've had some trouble with bears. Everything else I don't really mind, raccoon and skunks and stuff. This pit is inside an electric fence. Bears seem to have moved on for this year.
The methods I use for biochar produce soft charcoal. I've seen people say that is bad and people say that it's good. I don't really care that much at this point because it's so easy to produce and I know it works. Accessibility is more important to me and a lot of people than making the absolute best charcoal by whatever means necessary. I do save a little, just as I'm sorting through, but not much. I really need to set up another means of making smithing charcoal and have been stashing some wood for that. I can use this though and have. I used it in the black jack video. ua-cam.com/video/aOBtaARfLwU/v-deo.html&lc=z13vetshsyztgly4i04cf5fy1trlepj5arc0k
I understand what you mean about the "quality" charcoal question. I think a lot of time is wasted in the biochar discussion messing around with retort designs etc vs figuring out how to best use it as a soil amendment in different soils and climates.
I just think the best thing we can do now is proceed by any means with whatever materials and situation is at hand. Plenty of people have proven that it can work with low tech approaches and the complication and debate and dogma just keeps people from acting. It took me a couple of years to get started because I was waiting to build some kind of retort or something. Once I started using simple means I've produced hundreds of gallons of charcoal. We can worry about tweaks and details later.
Good idea.
Do you pulverize your bones before putting it in the Catch Pit (I like it)? Or are you a harvester of marrow and just toss the split bones in?
All kinds of bones. I just toss them in for long term fertility. Crushing or otherwise breaking down bones is on my list of things to figure out though. I have an old account that uses quicklime and wood ashes. Ashes alone definitely weakened them, but didn't dissolve them.
If you make bone broth out of them first then they soften to the point of being easily crushed, and you have a healthy mineral and collagen rich base for soups etc.
Oh how wonderful to be able to dig such a huge hole! We can dig about a foot before we hit limestone.
Hey, when life gives you limestone, make lime! ua-cam.com/video/jOxaOTUGuKo/v-deo.html
Any updates on the Biochar catch?
Not really. I still haven't taken the monster artichoke near this out and it provides a lot of competition as it's very old. This year a rodent got most of the shoots too :(
Legend
Around me they sell "cowboy charcoal" and it is chunks of scrap from wood cabinet makers and it is 1x4 and other small pieces of wood and it is turned into charcoal that should be a way to use in the ground char!? Anyone have an opinion?
Should be fine. You will find people arguing for this or that kind of charcoal, but I think you probably couldn't find a natural wood charcoal, regardless of how it is prepared or charged or innoculated, that doesn't have any effect once it settles in.
Been watching you for long time and we all need to be more like you!!
Not in all ways, believe me ;)
this vid just inspired me to overhaul my small suburban backyard. i have sand. all sand. everywhere. i'm wondering if i dig out all my flower beds down like a foot, start throwing in compost and nasty rotting good stuff and then layer with biochar that i can make in my fire pit, i think that would be a good start. but do i layer sand back over of all that and plant? or should i look at importing some better soil? i live in a high desert, so the sand might take over again. what do you think, Senor Edholm?
I would think about getting some soil with clay in it as well. I'm not sure at what percentage char would become detrimental instead of helpful. Organic matter in those soils burns right up. I would keep your eyes out from some real soil. Even subsoil if it has the right composition to improve your sand. You can grow in sand or anything else with enough water and nutrients. Pretty much thats what hydroponics is, but it's not idea.
thank you. i'll keep an eye out. that's gonna get pricey, importing soil. ugh. but i got my first batch of biochar done. turned out pretty good. bout 1/3 of a wheelbarrow full
but i wonder if i should even bother since my plan is to xeriscape anyway.
Maybe not. I was assuming food. It may also change the PH and shift it higher. Those soils are often already high ph, so that's something to think about
well i do want to do food also, but maybe raised beds would be better with a biochar layering.
Any hole any depth it's all good
So do you think bio char would benefit potted plants?
Yes, my guess is that we will see it as a standard potting mix ingedient soon. Once production is normal and cost effective. It really has a lot of good qualities. However, one thing I've learned is that while it takes on a lot of water, it actually looses it pretty fast. Difference bettween absorbing and holding. Organic matter is probably better at taking and holding. But it does take on some water, unlike many aggregates and it also has some of the properties of organic matter at the same time, and probably some extra. Just that it can grab nutrients as they travel through the pot in water and hold it for later is I think unique, or I doubt there are other cheap materials that will be found to equal it. Then there is just the biochar effect, whatever combination of properties makes it cause plants to grow better in many cases. It is great in cactus mixes. I use 50% or more, because you want lots of aggregate, but it has all those other properties.
I think there is still a lot to be learned, we'll see, but my suspicion is that by 10 years or less, it will be a common potting mix addition
@@SkillCult yes definitely, i find it very interesting though, thanks for the vidoes!
I called up the local nursery and landscaping place and they had never heard of biochar.
give them another 5 or 10 years.
Outdoor organic junk drawer comes to mind. The place for everything w/o a place ;) Catch pit much better name though.
Yeah, love it lol. Everyone has a junk drawer! I have more than one, plus every horizontal surface and the floor :)
love it!
nice haws waterer my man!
can you grow mushrooms on char?
Dunno, I'm sure someone is trying it, or will soon. I doubt on pure char, but growing them on a mix seems worth experimenting with. Not based on any theory, but just to see what happens. I've seen fungus colonize it very quickly after burning before. THey might be after the byproducts of combustion.
How did it go man?
The plant has just really gotten well established this year. There are large plants right up against it slurping up resources, so when those come out and the plant gets full sized, I'll know more.
I don’t believe I could use charcoal since my soil ph is over 8 already. Wood ash at least is alkaline and will raise the ph even higher. But I do save scraps and burry them in my garden already.
probably not. I've heard char is supposed to have a permanent effect on soil, raising the ph. I'd probably still do the experiment though.
SkillCult I did a little research and what I was able to find looked like charcoal didn’t have much of any affect on ph. Ash however will raise your ph. Anyways I had pruned my trees and last Friday converted all my prunings into charcoal with my double stacked 55 gallon barrel system. And I’m happy to report it worked quite well. I got more than 55gallons of charcoal in 6 hours with mostly all green wood. I used some pallet wood to get the heat started. I’m going to try to take a short video of my system the next time I fire it up so others can use this idea.
@@christophergruenwald5054 I've heard it said that there is a permanent shift up in ph, but I haven't really followed up. Ash is transient in that effect. Please let me know if you make that video. I"d like to see what you're doing. Thanks for reporting back.
I'd like to be totally convinced about biochar, but I have some queries.
I notice in some of your other videos, that the charcoal actually migrates to the top of the soil after lots of watering or rain. Being so light and hollow, it is not surprising that this would occur. So really, isn't its tendency to be washed out of the soil with time, rather than to permanently improve It? Also, when I have had a bucket of ash and charcoal that sat out in the rain ... the light charcoal again, floated on top. So by what mechanism can it be "charged" in either solution or a wet compost etc? And how long can that "charging" possibly last? Surely, very soon, any elements taken up by the charcoal, would be exhausted? And only an inert drainage-improving place-holder would remain in the soil, if it was buried deep enough to escape being washed out again.
Vast areas of Aussie bush that were cleared then had the stumps and limbs burnt off in massive windrows, before being ploughed & cropped, would surely have had vast quantities of charcoal incorporated into the soil. The effects on future tree crops are staggering, where they are growing on the rich deposit of potash-rich ash, in our generally phosphorus-deficient soil. But these soluble K+ salts are soon washed away or locked up in timber. I cannot recognise any ongoing advantage of the charcoal buried in the soil.
Isn't it at least equally advantageous to soil structure and fertility, to add the carbon to the soil in the form of decaying lignin? Wood, that is. Yes, eventually it will decompose entirely and release some CO2 into the atmosphere ... but isn't that what we should really be doing? What is it about the term "Greenhouse gas" that terrifies people? Don't they ever connect it with this concept ... of a protected growing environment with an abundance of the nutrients required for healthy plant growth? The invisible but paramount ingredient in the greenhouse, is CO2, and water vapour which is actually the highest volume "greenhouse gas," is also essential. There is no magic about the number "300". Greenhouses which are hermetically sealed, at a CO2 level of 300 ppm, would quicklyhave all that growth-inducing CO2 absorbed by its plants, as soon as the sunlight shone on them. Greenhouse growing requires a source of incresing the CO2 level, from 300 ppm to at least 1,000 - 1,200 ppm. Plants produce their substance, carbohydrate, from CO2 and water. Without these, they die. The higher the CO2 level of the atmosphere, the more plants can grow, providing somebody plants more than they are cutting down. We cannot "green" the earth unless we maintain high atmospheric CO2 levels!
What a conceited species man is, to imagine that an arbitrarily-set number should govern the percentage of CO2 in the entire earth's atmosphere! Forever! The fact is that temperatures were previously much warmer, water more abundant, and CO2 levels much higher, than they presently are, when the earth was more of a :"greenhouse," with much higher plant coverage and better rates of growth. Animals grew to much greater sizes. What is wrong with that?
Plus, if I dug a big hole like this at my place (a flood plain), it would fill with water and create a foetid anaerobic sump with all that organic matter.
Have you seen Joseph Jenkiins' many videos on his excellent compost toilet system? He is adamant about scooping a shallow hollow in the ground, adding a thick "biological sponge" of old organic material such as sawdust and weeds & straw inside a dedicated compost bin made of timber, then adding regular layers of toilet contents, garden weeds, kitchen waste, dead dogs and possums, meat scraps, innards, whatever. It is all reduced to compost at safe high temps within about 3 weeks. But it is all done above ground and above the water table so nothing undecomposed leaches into the soil. After a year from finishing each heap, it is safe to use on the garden. Jenkins has done amazing work in developing countries, with his compost toilet systems being sweet-smelling, fly-free, disease-proof and creating bulk usable compost, compared to the UN's stinking fly-infested chemical toilets. Worth looking through his playlist.
Well, the most important thing is not how it works, but that it works. It could be useful to know how it works of course and that could lead to better implementation, but it's vastly less important than the general results. If you look at the literature on terra pretta, the african dark earths and the stuff I dug up on 19th century use of charcoal in Europe and North America skillcult.com/blog/2012/05/18/some-citations-on-biochar-in-europe-and-america-in-the-19th-century, not to mention many modern examples, it is quite clear that it can work very well and that the effect is not transient. It is not safe to extrapolate that to every soil and every plant obviously, it is compelling enough that we should try it everywhere. Charcoal is extensively used to grab all kinds of stuff from nutrients to toxins. How, I don't care all that much and what exactly it holds that is of benefit to plants and how that all works I haven't been interested enough to do much research. Nitrogen for sure, but the rest I'm not sure. The benefit could be that it serves as a net to catch some of the stuff that would normally leach through the soil. Here we have high enough rainfall that leaching is a major problem. Ash is amazing for feeding plants here, but it is very transient. Some of the stuff should be staying, but it is quite obvious that the general effect is temporary. The decay prone organic matter carbon stuff like wood debris and compost is also very transient in the soil. I've been gardening here for 12 years, but if I walked away, the fertility of the garden soil would soon match that of the surrounding meadow. Yet, african dark earth is still more fertile 800 years later. The early American accounts talk about old charcoal pits being easily spotted by the lush growth decades later. That is not the effect of ash. You can't see anything where any of my old burn piles were. The other often touted theory is that it provides more microbe habitat. Whatever is going on in there, must be very complicated. At this point, the reason it works is of minimal interest to me. What interests me is getting in as many experiements as I can in my soil, with char made from my feedstock, the way I char it and see what happens. The rest will always be of less interest and is miles less important. If it continues to work well, then there will be something interesting to study. I don't understand the approach of coming at it the other way. Pot trials and myopic experiments have much less relevance to me than historical and physical evidence.
Probably little charcoal was really added to the soil by clearing unless it was intentional. The default for clearing and slash and burn is to burn to ash to get rid of the bulk, and/or intentional ash production for short term fertility. It is a good way to grow a garden for a few years, but the fertility is transient, and then you have to go do it again elsewhere. Given the large quantities of char in the anthropogenic char soils, it is difficult to imagine them happening accidentally on any scale. Maybe with untold generations of sloppy slash and burn, but the goal is usually ash for crops. There is a huge production difference in charcoal if you actually lean toward optimization of char production.
As far as greenhouse gasses go, I don't have a lot of strong opinions and I think there are too many unwarranted strong opinions. It seems very unlikely that the effect is not real. Scientists were talking about it when I was a kid and now the climate has gone all wonky. It takes a religious like conviction to believe that is just a coincidence. Like all issues, there is a lot of people on both sides just believing what they want to believe and not thinking very much. You might know a lot more than me about it, but it's my understanding that CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, but it gets the most press and it is the one that can be drawn down and sequestered as far as I know. It provides a rallying point. Burning mass amounts of fossil fuels has other negative effects from global conflict to other types of pollution and we should curb that shit. That should be obvious to anyone. The reason people are freaking out is that a major climate shift is probably going to be devastating to humans and temporarily to environments as they are now. It's already annoying to me and may even have serious consequences before I'm dead. People think of nature as relatively static and to be conserved as is as if there is some perfect nature masterplan. The masterplan is actually adaptation. On the other hand to cavalierly say that nothing matters because nature will adapt and we should run rough shod over everything is a gross and retarded point of view. We do have very, very old naturally evolved ecologies in place that have evolved check and balances and unique species and are amazing and beautiful. There is all kinds of chaos afoot because of human intervention. Human initiated climate change is just a really broad brush stroke.
In the long run, regarding CO2 specifically, I'm pretty much inclined to agree with you, which almost always gets either deer in the headlights looks from one side and some ignorant faith based spittle laced crap from the other. I generally avoid discussing it very often because people are so crazy. I'm generally interested in CO2 and the idea that life evolved in a higher CO2 environment. I've even thought of trying to create artificially co2 boosted environments as a health experiment. I also try to breath as little as possible to increase CO2 retention ala Buteyko. We'll all be hearing more about the important physiologic usefulness of CO2 soon. But does that mean we should dump tons of it into the atmosphere, changing the climate and causing a period of mass adaptation? I actually think that is a question worth asking, but not an idea to approach in a cavalier manner. One thing for sure, a large climate shift will be inconvenient for humans and ecologies as they currently are in the short run. Also, It will shift again eventually.
If a big hole like this would turn into a foetid cess pool, you should probably do something else. Depending on resources, pits could still be used during the dry season in most places. Here it would take incredible amounts of rain to create long standing water in this pit, but that's in my soil. This would probaby work most places I've lived. three are other options, like some type of mound system using above ground layering. The concept is simple, failure to implement because a pit will fill with water or drown somone's chihuahua seems like a failure of creativity more than a hard limit. I've never liked the Jenkins system. I've seen people try to implement it for the last 25 years or more and it is rarely well maintained as outlined in the book. It requires frequent maintenance involving handing and manually washing out shit buckets, and it requires a huge quantity of organic matter. If i recall right, he talks about importing sawdust by the dump truck load. Then it has to be carefully composted in a specific way. It seems like an inelegant system and I've personally never seen it run well, though I've seen it run very poorly. That is understandable, since it is not very convenient. In my zone here, pit latrines are okay, but this system could be awesome in the right context. As long as the goal is permanent soil building and the motivation is there to keep digging holes, it seems pretty awesome. If the goal is to dispose of "waste", then not so much. The infrastructure could be a problem though. Pooping in a hole and immediately covering it over permanently, never to been seen, smelled or touched again is pretty appealing, add leaving an engineered super soil behind that could last for millennia and that is pretty cool. The permanent stationary system I'm most interested in is the urine diverting EcoSan system which uses wood ashes and desiccation over a long period of time. It requires extremely low maintenance and diverts the urine for independent use as an easily applied soluble fertilizer, which I've been all about for years. I would probably add a solar oven effect in the system to insure sterility, but overall, it looks pretty great. It is above ground, so there is no issue with flooding or groundwater contamination where that is likely to be a problem. It does require adequate amounts of ash, but that is not a problem anywhere I've lived. There is very little maintenance besides cleaning it out when it's finished drying and aging. it is a dry system and the ash assists in sanitation. I haven't used it, so I don't know what the realities are, but it looks much better on paper than the humanure system by a huge margin.
Thanks for the lengthy response! I shall read & digest.
Making charcoal sure sounds like fun, but I don't usually have wood to spare.
In the meantime, I have discovered that my 2 retired horses, confined on small patches of fairly worthless herbage, are churning out over 1 cubic metrre of scrumptious-looking poop per week! Am gathering this up to layer thickly on my poor soil beneath old woodchips, chicken droppings, scythed weeds, etc. Hopefully this will convert large beds of inert soil to a thriving microcosm of living earth over the coming winter.
Where are you located?
Norcal
oh, that means northern california lol...
Why dig the hole so deep you could cover twice the ground at half the depth and still be plenty deep for your plants.
Just my observation
It's the climate. 6 months of drought leaves no useable water in the top layers of soil for many months. If there is any benefit to soil modification it has to extend deeply. Also, both the terra preta and african dark earth soils are up to 2 meters deep. Whether they were created that way or the stuff sifted gradually into the lower soil horizons I'm not sure. I'll eventually be testing the efficacy of shallower and deeper applications, but for now I'm using the working assumption that over two feet deep is going to be best for deep rooted perennials and trees. There are other potential benefits I think, but only time and testing will shed much light on any of it as far as how it all plays out in real life. My real interest though is in deep soil modification to mimic something closer to deep fertile valley and flood plain soils. My conception of those is that they are not extra fertile because the top 12 inches are super fertile, but because the soils are both rich and deep.
Yea!!!!
Amen!
where are you
Northern California, temps rarely below 20 degree f.