Phil Stevens

I'm not sure I know of anything that fits all of those criteria, but one thing you do see a lot in temperate deciduous woodlands are bulbs, like bluebells and wild alliums. They take advantage of the early spring sun before the trees are fully leafed out, do their thing, and then go dormant when it gets shady. They're not nitrogen fixers but all that decaying foliage must contribute a bit right around the time the trees can use it.

My vote would be for a skyline or a funicular railway. Either one could have two cars so that the weight of the downhill one provides most of the pull needed to get the other one up. You could get really clever by incorporating a water tank in the cars and a way to adjust water levels remotely.

I've got to hand it to the World In Maps crew for placing NZ in the South Australian Bight. That's a new one. Usually we just get left off world maps (along with the rest of the Pacific Islands).

The dark skies one is a bit sobering.

Excess nitrogen can take different forms. Nitrate is the most common one encountered in food-growing and domestic situations, but ammonia is also an issue (think poultry litter or an overly hot compost pile). Plain biochar made from woody material is really good at mitigating ammonia and moderately good at adsorbing nitrates. The feedstock and temperature can influence nitrate mitigation potential, like using grass or crop residue instead of wood, and producing it at lower temperatures. Then there are the additives and tweaks. Iron is just one of many...clay also adds interesting qualities and enhances a lot of the filtering properties of biochar.

Without getting too far into the weeds, the main things that are happening with biochar when we try to sop up contaminants are cation exchange and functionality. Cation exchange is something that clay soils are really good at and involves negative electrical charges on the edges of the particles that attract positively charged ions when they're in solution with water. Functionality refers to the formation of organic molecule complexes (clumps) on the edges of the biochar surface structure. High functionality is something we get in lower temperature biochars, which tend to have less surface area...tradeoffs are everywhere.

Ammonium ions are positively charged, so any biochar with a decent cation exchange capacity (CEC) will soak them up. Nitrate is negative, though, so all the CEC in the world doesn't really help. But functional groups can have anion exchange potential and handle this problem. What's neat about biochar is that regardless of the material or method, after it's been in the soil for a while this property actually improves (not forever, but at least for the first several years). The other thing that's advantageous about using biochar to mitigate excess nitrogen is that it will happily give it up to plants and fungi when they need it.

r ransom wrote:

Grape
The length between the nodes is the limiting factor preparing these.  Taking the bark off is a hassle.  There is a much smaller range of thickness possible.  This year's growth is easier to cut, but it seems to make better charcoal if left to dry a few months before cutting to final length and putting in the tin.  When dry, we can roll the sticks in our hands and much of the bark comes off.  But it's not as bothersome to leave the bark on as it flakes off the charcoal when we open the tin.  

Since I have to prune this back every year, it's a renewable source.  But the extra labor of having to cut each side of the node makes prepping thismtwice as much work as willow.

Very easy to pack tight in the tin due to straight and small sticks.

Most crumbling of the charcoal so far. Lightest black.  But most neutral black, with a slight purple lean.  Smudges easily, almost to the point of erased.  

I wonder if the grape sticks could be tumbled with sand to speed up the debarking. I had a rock tumbler when I was a kid and something like this might work.

If it's something that could re-root and start growing again, make hay with it by letting it dry in the sun for several days and then use it. You'll give up a little bit of the nutrient potential, but to me that's a good tradeoff for not getting it estabilshed where you don't want it.

Encouraging, but the process looks like it requires inputs that most of us don't have. Enhanced biochars are a fascinating topic and I have a low-tech method of making magnetic biochar by treating feedstock with rust and oxalic acid. Hopefully I can get it tested soon to see how it performs (lab work is $$).

One of my biochar colleagues shared this with me earlier today. Looks like this guy has figured out an easy way to make foolproof aircrete:

You pretty much nailed it with your first question. A woodstove and an RMH are two very different animals. An RMH is a system and the stratification chamber (or mass bench, if it's an older design) is a component whose function is to accumulate the thermal energy released in the combustion chamber, store it in the mass, and release it to the space that's being heated. Very few woodstoves approach the level of complete, super-efficient combustion that you get with a properly built RMH, and so they aren't really suited to having this extra volume and mass inserted into the picture.

At best you might get a little extra "thermal flywheel" effect, but the downsides are several. You will change the draft of the stove, possibly choking it and risking smokeback and deadly CO in the living space. You will probably cool the flue gases below the condensation point and this will cause creosote deposits and raise the possibility of a chimney fire.

Your existing woodstove firebox is not designed to do what a batchbox does, so a lot of modification would be required. It might be possible to build a proper core inside of it but you'd have to be pretty fortunate if all the dimensions turned out to work.

The problem with silicone (aside from the toxic gick aspect) is that once it's on there, you'll never be able to get anything to adhere. The thing about cob is that it's super easy to patch cracks and chips, or mold new features. If you introduce a material that prevents this, you've just wrecked one of cob's best attributes.