Making Biochar

Update: Winter

Thanks for taking the time out of your busy lives to read a little about mine.

Lately, my direction has felt a bit scatterbrained, so I’ve been stepping back from the social media world and leaning into what really grounds me, projects on the land. With winter settling in, I’ve been experimenting with different preparation techniques ahead of planting out a food forest. Yes, that includes biochar (more thoughts on that coming soon).

We’re also working on setting up an annual garden within the forest system, so that’s been another area of focus. Between that, tending the land, and staying warm, my weekends have been full but in the best way. These activates gives me true purpose so thank you again for supporting me just through watching along.

Let’s get into biochar!

Biochar

Keria and I recently attended a Biochar workshop at our local community garden.  Prior to this my knowledge of the subject was pretty standard. I had deep dived through YouTube and often heard other gardeners talk of its benefits, yet still.. I never really dived at it with great intention. Part of me thought it was too hard or too much work.

After the workshop and doing it myself I realised the hardest thing was preparation. Here I will be covering

-What is Biochar

- How i made mine (step by step)

What is Biochar: 

I want to preface this by saying this isn’t' a new hack, this is a technique used by indigenous people way back when. One of the most well-known historical examples comes from the Amazon Basin, where Indigenous peoples created incredibly fertile soils known as terra preta, or “dark earth.” Go down that rabbit hole.

So while we talk about biochar now (as a trend), it’s really an ancestral technology. There is nothing new under the sun and it’s humbling realise: this isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about reconnecting with practices that understood soil as a living system, not just something to extract from.

Biochar is baked carbon not burnt. The difference between both is burnt equals coal, we want baked carbon biochar. The objective is to minimize the oxygen that a fire is receiving when baking your choice of material. Once completed you’ll have a porous form of carbon that is said to be able to hold enormous amounts of water, air and nutrients within the material. 

Think of it like this: you're creating housing for microbes. If you were to put biochar into the soil it would pull microbes into the houses, so what is recommended is ‘charging’ it first. That consists of adding microbes before using. Here are two ways I’m using it

1. Adding it to compost, and putting it with our seedling when propagating/seed raising our plants. 

2. Drenching it in homemade fertilizer, I'm using cow manure also seaweed sitting in buckets of rainwater breaking down into liquid form then adding.

In reference to material, I used old wood that had been laying around the property since last year and during the workshop they used aged bamboo, they referenced people using things like coffee husks, nut shells and sawdust but I can only speak on wood with my current experience. 

From my experience wrist size wood works best. Large logs I used didn’t completely crystallize but that’s ok because I put them through the process again. 

A big take away during the workshop was this sentence. “It’s not in the good times when you see it working, it’s during the hard time.” 

The region I'm in can get pretty arid at times, so fingers crossed this sentence lives true. 

As an activity on a winters day it was great fun with a sprinkle of dangerous and who doesn’t enjoy smelling like a wood fire. I also recommend going down the rabbit hole of terra preta, truly fascinating.

Right now, I’m still in the phase of learning and observing this whole space around biochar. I'm ever curious to see how it might affect my property.

I'm always open to trying something like this, especially when it makes use of free and natural resources.

Good luck out there.