Homeowner Forum / Lawn and Garden / July 2008

Okay, without actually reading all the stuff, but getting annoyed with
the lack of pactical stuff compared to "buff my academic career BS", my
2c is;

Charcol is really slash and burn agriculture. Good for about 2 years
then it effects fades, which is why all these communities were
essentially nomadic.

There also seems to be a current fad for soaking charcol in liquid
fertiliser then burying it as a slow delivery tool, but this relies on
externaly procured fertilisers.

Now, Amazon Basin, El Dorado and a spanish explorer that every expert
swore was a kook making up stories as there was absolutely no way that
the rainforest was going to support the millions of natives that he said
it did. BTW, rainforest actually has an exceddingly poor soil if you
didn't know.

Then there was a TV doco about a sudden penchant for this soil from
built up along the Amazon for top dressing on Brazilliam gardens. When
examined, it turned out to be loaded with CHAR, not charcol.

Then someone put two and two together and worked out that this highly
fertile deposits were the built up soild deposits were the remains of
the garden beds of the native inhabitants of the Amazon Basin of the
time of the spanish explorer. Further, whe someone got off their arse
and walked around and mapped the area, then tested the capacity of the
soil, there was enough capacity to support the millions of people
claimed by that explorer.

The soil "deposits" were the raised garden beds, which had been made by
bulding up soil that was higher than the annual floods and the soil was
loaded with char particles, which was made it very fertile.

I notice that the first Terra-Pretta articles continues to show the
stupidity of the academics that swore El Dorado was kook land. Anyway..

Now, as I understand it, char is a stage before charcoal and so what I
want to know, is what is a good backyard method for producing char, not
charcol?

The only information I can find is about using other feedstocks such as
coal, but as I have large trees and not a coal mine in my backyard,
these are no help.

Has anyone here been a charcoal burner?
Thinking that I just need to interrupt the process earlier and grind the
wood down.

<Charlie> wrote in message

Good Lord!  Here I am having been using something called bio-char and never,
ever knew it.  I just called it ashes.

Terre preta isn't a term that means anything to me and I thought that
charcoal was made under heaps of earth and that took several days of
specialist burning to produce.

But having said that, I do use the ash in the ash pans which come from
burnings wod in winter in our fires (both our heater and our slow combustion
stove (range)).  I sieve the fine ash from the large black chunks and the
ash is used like lime and the black chunks (which are sort of a bit like
real charcoal) are used in the base of pot plants to keep the soil 'sweet'
and any I don't ned for pots gets thrown somewhere on a bed and eventually
mixed into the soil when it gets dug.  I work in the theory that anything
that has once lived is recyclable back to the soil.

Can't say that I've ever noticed anything out of the ordinary about it, but
it also does no harm either.