as per usual Mr. Gee, very timely info…
I’ve been cooking biochar this week and came to the realization today that different tree species should be used since there are differences in the sticky factor of the sap and density of the wood.
Take for example a poplar tree, it’s a lightweight but wet wood and the sap is not sticky, when a poplar limb is dried- it breaks very easily. Compare that to pine, which is more dense, loaded with sticky sap and doesn’t break nearly as easy. Pretty confident that (because of diffent densities and thickness of the sap) these factors will cause the resulting biochar to hold more or less water than another tree species… written poorly (while not stoned) so it may not make sense.
Anywho noticed that when cooking biochar it makes sense to cook 1 species at a time. If I mix poplar & pine then the poplar gets carbonized pretty fast but the pine takes twice as long.
Another salient point is don’t just use 1 part of the host tree. Mostly I use small branches but I cut sone trees a while back and left them at the edge of the woods, now there’s huge sheets of thick pine bark just ripe for the taking and the pine bark seems to be more lightweight & less sticky than pine limbs full of sap.
Interesting side note… pine trees were highly sought after in years gone by for naval stores… tar, pitch and turpentine are made by cooking down pine trees. The resultant goo was used to waterproof cracks or gaps in the planks on wooden ships…
Easy homemade biochar… buy a clean empty paint can from big box hardware store, pop a hole in the lid, fill it with your wood chips, replace the lid and set it on the grill. (Straight up or sideways doesn’t matter either orientation is fine) When smoke is coming out of the hole the wood is being carbonized, when there’s no more smoke being emitted from the hole- then your biochar is done cooking.
Biochar is supposed to be pre-charged by soaking it in water filled with your favorite goop… pick your poison… mycos, Neem seed meal, fish ferts, kelp meal, whatevs. Evaporation city, let it dry in the sun or run a fan over the container of biichar / goo water until all the water evaporates off.
Edit to modify….. whoops don’t use plain biochar without pre-charging it. Plain (uncharged biochar) will steal your nitrogen to compost the wood. Crap I knew this but forgot so huge thank you to Mr Azi for the correction…!!!!
Nice post Oh One Three
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Everything about biochar sounds good yet I am hesitant to use it. For 1 reason only. It lasts forever.
Now that being said, it's pretty darned awesome stuff. As long as it's no more than 5% of your mix you are good, but if you rebuild and add a little every round and overall you get over 5% you could start to retain too much moisture.
Roots will also never grow into it like they do into wood carbon, so you never get a mile of roots stuffed into a hollow piece of bark like a ball of cotton batten, directly attached to humates.
But don't scowl yet, I'm a LOS grower. If you like to pour nutrients in, it's premixed so you don't need the same style of CEC, the mix has the charge in it and as it runs across the roots it gets in, and microbes do eat it and process it, but it becomes a hydroponic organic system, and now biochar becomes very valuable as a medium within the medium to hold moisture (feed water) in place and eaten by microbes and you have a bio-hydroponic system in your pot and the biochar replaces the humates to great success.
In LOS as long as you keep it to about 5%, and that can certainly vary depending on the density and amount of soil carbon in the mix, it will work great.
I would need a lighter-than-coco soil carbon and I love coco so I don't upset the balance with biochar.
If you have low carbon soil in the ground, biochar becomes unbelievably valuable. It will revive that soil with one application and never need to be replenished.
I love your instructions on how to make it too, thats a great post and if anyone wants to play with biochar I highly recommend it, but if you rebuild that soil you need to manage the accumulative amount used as the rebuilds add up.
I would gladly use 5% except for the fact that what do you do with that soil when your done with it? If you always throw it into your garden it will accumulate.
I know that sounds like I'm knocking it, but I'm not. Ancient civilizations used it to great success to grow food for millions.
Those beds on archeological sites still today are extremely fertile. They managed it's amount and composted the rest of their carbon, they didn't over-biochar the beds, they did a set it and forget it approach to start the new bed, then managed the soil just as we would with compost thereafter.
If you respect that biochar to soil ratio, you will see a great boost and better water retention.
Do you brix your plants? I would love to see both brix results and the calcium line results on different ratios of biochar levels in your mixes. There will be a sweet spot for sure to combine with your conventional choice of soil carbon. The balance. You just need to dial that in and then don't add any more biochar that alters it's ratio.
