Phil Stevens

Coydon Wallham wrote:
I ocassionally pull stuff out of my RMH that are dense and chunky, but they have the consistency more of sandstone (or something friable) than glass. Is that simply ash?

What are some uses for slags and/or clinkers?

That's slag or maybe sand if you put in branches that had dirt on them. The best thing to do with it is use it anywhere you need aggregate. I like to sieve it into various grades for adding to earth and lime plaster mixes. Or you can use it to bulk up garden beds and potting mix.

Bones in my soil take decades to break down. If I put them through a fire I can crumble them and get those nutrients available much faster. All bones and shells get the biochar treatment here.

I coppice lots of willows and have started doing it with the hazelnuts. Some willows and poplars get pollarded, like the ones in the fruit orchard where I have this plan to stretch a network of wire and put bird netting over all the trees at once. I also pollard most of the Tasmanian blackwoods that pop up semi-randomly from root suckers, with the plan to eventually harvest the trunks for timber and firewood. And last winter I decapitated three redwoods but left a few horizontal branches on each with the idea of training them daisugi style.

Deane Adams wrote:Well I am most certainly one of the others.  

???

I have no idea what you guys are talking about.

Peace

Deane, it's possible that you're not seeing the new format because your email client is displaying plain text only. If there's an option to switch it to show HTML, you will see what we're ooh-ing and aah-ing over.

One of the beautiful things about internet standards (like all the ones that apply to email) is that they give users choices about how they want to work. So the new "pretty" emails are still perfectly readable, and look just about identical to the older ones if you aren't set up to render the eye candy. Either way the information gets across.

If the digging is easy I'd say do it. I excavated to have my greenhouse sit on a perimeter foundation with the floor sunk down about 70 cm. Digging trenches probably would have broken me, because I'm on a river terrace and there is rock everywhere.

Alexandra Malecki wrote:wow, thanks for creating this! I also have wonderings about how much of the remaining coals are considered biochar. I think I need to do more research.

All of them, unless there are bits that haven't carbonised all the way through. The first human use of biochar was probably unintentional, as the remnants of cooking fires were dumped and mixed into garden soils. The gardeners noticed the benefits and we can pretty safely assume that at some point they started doing it on purpose.

Anne Miller wrote:What is the difference between wood ash and biochar?

Is it that wood ash is a byproduct of some other application?

Or that wood ash is powdery and biochar is chunk like charcoal?

When added to soil does it make a difference?

Ash is all the stuff in wood that won't burn. Biochar is elemental carbon from wood (or other biomass) that has been heated but not completely burned. The minerals that make up ash are in biochar, but the carbon in ash is in carbonate form.

Ash tends to be powdery because all the structures that held it in place are gone. In a really hot fire it sinters and forms slag and clinkers. These are the chunky bits that are hard to grind, and are a bit like volcanic glass. Biochar can be chunky or powdery depending on what it's made from and what you do with it after you make it.

Ash and biochar do very different things in soil. Ash is mostly a chemical modifier, adding alkalinity and minerals. Biochar adds structure, water and nutrient capacity, aeration, homes for bacteria and fungi, and its surface area has electrochemical properties that do all sorts of cool stuff.

This is why I self-host my email, even though it's a pain at times.

I sift to remove rocks, bones and shells (these go through the fire instead), and bits of plastic. Everything else that doesn't fall through the screen goes back into a working bin.

Is this a piped mass or a stratification chamber? Because you are almost certainly going to have to clean out all that ash during the heating season and if it's piped there's a risk of blockage. This is why I prefer to burn hardwood in my 4" J-tube in the greenhouse...cleaning the run through the cob bench is a bitch.