Ben Zumeta

Welcome Kristoffer. I have lived in the PNW most of my life, and while I love travel, can’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else. I would recommend a road trip from Bellingham, WA, (a very cool place worth checking out), around the Olympic Peninsula to Eureka, CA (I think of the PNW coast as encompassing the Coast Redwood and Sitka Spruce rainforests northward). This is a worthwhile trip in its own right with many amazing National Parks and nice towns. I really like Bellingham, Olympia, the San Juans (especially Orcas) Port Angeles-Sequim, Brookings, Hiouchi/Gasquet (my area), and Arcata.

I would recommend strongly considering fire risk and how these may be realistically mitigated. I’d also try to gauge your tolerance for long periods of dark rainy weather in the winter. Having snowy mountains above the clouds nearby to ski on or go east of into a rain shadow is a nice way to mitigate this light deprivation. The ability to choose your own weather 3/4 of the time is one of the best parts of where I live in Del Norte County (far NW CA), with Hiouchi being the closes town. If you’d like any more info for around here, PM me. I know a good local realtor with permaculture values and homesteading experience.

John, this is why I would use compost extract instead, bubbled while applying right away just to keep it mixed in a 50gal container elevated above biochar pile. Extract is more diverse and resilient than tea, as it has not been adapted to being fed or aerated. I only use tea for foliar applications, as its main benefit is natural glues for sticking to plants (based on my interpretation of an Elaine Ingham paper). The carbon and most nutrients are in the char along with N in the air is abundant microbe food. This also selects for microbes that can acquire these on their own. Charging with Nitrogen will reduce the amount of N fixators, and Phosphorus will reduce P accumulators etc.

For soil amendement biochar, I inoculate when the quench is down to 90F with Johnson Su compost extract that has been supplemented with fish hydrolysate, rock dust and kelp for a diverse compliment of microbes and nutrients. Sometimes I add some dynamic accumulator weed infused apple cider or white wine vinegar at 1/1500 dilution. This usually gets mixed into new compost piles or layered with aged compost during topdressing. I also add the extract inoculated char to my chicken bedding, which then goes into my Johnson Su compost. For water decontamination or filtration biochar I just use no manure Johnson compost (except worm castings). I am open to learning better alternatives.

Eino Kenttä wrote:

John Suavecito wrote:Interesting idea, Jay. I have heard of biochar/charcoal being used as a filter for liquids many times.  It does seem to lower the stench of something like manure, but there seems to be a liquid factor.  My apples are in a non-air tight shed, so I don't think it's a big factor in my case.  

I seem to remember reading something somewhere here about storing apples in wood ash to make them last longer, because wood ash either absorbs or breaks down ethylene? Since char contains some ash and is also very porous, maybe it could work?

I read about storing cabbages in wood ash in Sepp Holzer’s book. I would also think some calcium is inherently going to be applied with biochar as it usually has some ash content. My understanding of how biochar works would make it reasonable to infer it’s improving the distinctive flavors of varietals much like how wines express themselves in different terroir. The biochar provides homes for diverse microbes and holds nutrients, so when the plant needs a particular thing it just needs to exude sugars (30-50% go into the soil, especially during fruiting) and microbes use that energy to acquire and process nutrients that become available to the plant. A bit like how a person can be their best self when they have a community support system with positive feedback providing what they need when they need it in return for what they contribute.

Dolly will be dearly missed by people of all stripes, and that reflects a life well lived.

This song by Boy Golden is by one of my favorite recent discoveries, who put on a great show at High Sierra Music Festival. It is both incredibly catchy and the lyrics uncannily sum up this moment in time to me:

https://music.apple.com/us/album/suffer/1834678403?i=1834678412

I think the main thing most misunderstand about how this works is the way above ground pruning causes roots to die back proportionally and decompose, enriching the soil from above and below. In the past, large herbivores and ecosystem engineers like elephants, elk, bears and beavers would be common enough and their movement unrestricted to find early succession forests and do this work of their own accord. Now we must do their work and help them return.

Our local Wild Rivers Permaculture Guild went in together on a Ring of Fire Kiln from Kelpie Wilson in 2022. This past winter-spring of 2025-26, we had our Fire Safe Council crew on my property help create 3-4acres of shaded fuel breaks, and in doing so made over 2000gal of biochar over 5 burns. The last burn was part of a workshop series I led called “Salvaging Abundance”, with around 30 attendees. We then had a subsequent workshop on using the larger woody debris for watershed restoration in repairing incised gullies. Where we did this work both protected our house and anchors a strategic fire protection line for our little off grid community as well as the private timberland, old growth redwoods and towns that are downwind of us in fire weather (NE winds).

The Fire Safe Council leadership was skeptical of the viability of making biochar while they have an immense amount of land to treat with shaded fuel breaks and limited resources to do so. They did not want to be slowed down dragging to a kiln. So we had some of their standard smoky brush pile burns where it was impractical to get the kiln close to the fuel on steep slopes. Where we had less distance (under 50yds) to haul brush to a flattish point for the kiln, we used it. I did a lot of the hauling to keep the crew on their saws cutting to keep on schedule. The kiln ripped through the brush so much faster and exposed the crews to far less smoke than their standard diesel soaked piles that it seemed to win over both the laborers and leadership. By the end of a few burns, they were talking about how many kilns they would need to maximize their crews’ efficiency and seemed serious about scaling up with the immense job they have been tasked with.

As for markets, I have yet to test that but workshop participants were happy to take home a few buckets of previously made and inoculated char. I also donated enough biochar for the compost being applied to thousands of acres of toxically contaminated former Easter lily bulb fields. These have until recently been polluting the largest undammed river in the lower 48, which is also amongst the cleanest until it reaches that agriculture coastal plain.

Our goal is to inoculate these fields with a Soil Food Web consultant’s compost (Declan Malone of BioBlends) that contains this locally produced biochar. I have also recommended using biochar in swales and drainages to filter out the accumulated toxins from lily bulb farming that have turned what was once and could be the best farmland and salmon habitat in California into a deathtrap for fish and the highest cancer and child developmental disorder hotspot in the state. I do not see biochar as a panacea, and no experts on it do in my understanding, but it clearly a very useful tool with benefits on both ends of production and application.

Arabic and Moorish cultures brought to Spain the method of growing on the berm in the wet season and the trough in the dry season. This can be done with terraces or swales. My strawberries have decided to use this method on their own as they spread from my hugels to paths that catch eroded soil.