Matthew Nistico

I second Hamish McFadden's motion: be sure to keep the chips produced from whittling and carving for use in the smoker!  Buying fruitwood chips for your smoker isn't too expensive, but if you have a free source, an activity that already produces wood shavings, why not use it?

And if you don't have a smoker, you should get one.  I love mine, though I surely don't use it as often as I should.  Mine is an electric chip smoker that I bought used at a good price.  But you can turn just a regular charcoal grill into a smoker for $10 with a smoke tube.  I bought this one: smoke tube  I actually plan to use it in conjunction with my electric smoker, which has a weakness in that it doesn't produce nearly as much smoke at lower temperatures.

On that note, I point out that both my electric smoker and my smoke tube are designed for hot smoking.  I suppose that the tube could be used in a cold smoking situation, but I'm not sure how well that would work.  Generally speaking, cold smoker set ups are more complicated than hot smokers.

My goals with biochar are 1) soil improvement, and 2) convenience.  My property produces volumes of woody debris, as any good permaculture property should.  I cut some for mushroom logs.  I use some to create brush piles for habitat around the edges of my food forest.  But what to do with the rest?

I refuse on principle to let the city haul it off.  I used to run what I could through a wood chipper, but that was too slow.  I have determined with some moderate degree of confidence that burning excess debris for biochar, although time consuming, requires less time and expense than chipping it.  This is the "convenience" goal fulfilled.  Plus, I value biochar as an end product more highly than just plain mulch, which I can import in bulk for nearly free in any case.

Biochar is more valuable in terms of $$$ as well.  My local Walmart sells a 20% biochar compost blend for something like $7/gallon, if I recall.  I don't recall who produces it.

I plan to divide the char I am producing into two streams.  One I will add to my own humanure composting system, ultimately feeding worm bins, and thus returning to my soil as biochar-enriched worm castings.

But the other I will add to a more conventional composting system in order to produce biochar-enriched compost that I can (hopefully) sell as a soil amendment on a local online farmers' market at an equivalent price to the commercial product I have observed.  With luck, I can earn enough selling this amendment to pay for the whole biochar production process.  If so, then I can consider whatever biochar ends up back in my own soil a pure bonus.

I will update in time as to how these plans worked out.  First, I need to build myself a machine to chip my charcoal into flakes ready to be inoculated via either of my two compost streams.

BTW, I am surprised to read several posters in this thread contemplating the possibility of "too much" biochar.  I seriously doubt that there can be such a thing as too much, either globally or in the context of any one person's backyard endeavors.  Granted, my suburban-scale homestead is a lot larger than many other suburban lots, at one full acre.  Perhaps there could be too much biochar in any one particular potted plant, but that's about all I am willing to concede.

I am not even attempting to calculate the total volume of biochar I might produce or what soil concentrations of biochar I might end up with.  I am currently burning whatever excess biomass I accumulate until it is all gone, and I'll do the same in the coming years so long as I figure that it remains a good use of my time.  And whatever amount of biochar ends up back in my soil, I'm sure I could use more!

Matthew Nistico wrote:...I have pursued a third option: a simple and cheap homemade take on the Kon-Tiki kiln.  Like a name brand Kon-Tiki kiln, mine has a solid bottom and solid sides; you build the fire up in layers, but all air flows from the top down.  I have built and operated mine fairly faithfully to this man's design and method: Farm Life Australia

I've only burnt char once, but I would call that one burn a success.  My observations:
- In the video, he is using 44-gallon drums (?)  I used 55-gallon drums, which is a standard size here in North America.
- I actually use two identical 55-gallon kilns side by side.  Both can be tended easily enough at one time, doubling the output per man-hour invested in each burn.
- Where I live, this design of kiln is easy to build with minimal capital investment.  The only expense, besides a few metal-cutting disks for your angle grinder, are the steel drums themselves.  I was able to obtain mine, used, for $10 each.  Finding ones with the solid top and bungs, as opposed to a clamp-down removable lid, was somewhat difficult.  Still, I obtained mine within a 1-hour drive.
- At first, burn a pilot fire with kindling and the bottom (larger) bung open.  (Note in the video that the opening cut into the "top" of the kiln, as laid on the drum's side, is exactly opposite the larger bung, which is closest to the ground.)  The extra airflow from the open bunghole will facilitate the burn.  This pilot fire is meant only to heat up the kiln.
- Once hot, reclose the bung hole.  I used a pair of tongs to manipulate the bung.  It isn't easy to get that close to the hot, radiating kiln, but it is possible if one is careful!  Then start layering additional fuel.  With all airflow now restricted to top-down, the kiln is ready to make char.
- Unlike a TLUD, this style kiln requires continual, though not constant, maintenance.  On average, I found myself adding wood and poking and prodding for about 20 minutes at a time, then taking 20 minutes to rest until the next layer.  This varies with the size of wood you're burning; larger wood, longer rest between layers.
- What he says in the video is true: so long as the fuel is well seasoned - and you really don't want to try burning green wood in this type of biochar kiln (ask me how I know this) - it is amazing how little smoke is produced.  This is because...
- The burn is hot!  The BTUs it puts out are staggering.  Next time, I will wear a face mask and a thermal apron to facilitate tending the fire without getting heat stroke, to which I thought I might succumb last time!  It was also a very hot day to begin with.  Poor timing on my part.
- To fill a 55-gallon kiln (or two, in my case) with char will take 4-5 hours burn time.  This includes a solid 30 minutes  to fill each barrel with quenching water using a garden hose.  Sadly, this is one part of the process that does require double the time for my two side-by-side kilns, unless you have two people wielding two garden hoses at once.
- In the video, he doesn't show how he drains the kiln after quenching, but describes using a syphon (only because his kiln has a busted bung).  Instead, when setting up your kiln, do so on slightly sloping ground and point the end with the bungs downhill.  Then, draining the kiln is simple: unscrew the bottom bung and 95% of the water drains out quickly.
- Perhaps I'm just a noob.  And as alluded to above, I had an unfortunate encounter half-way through my first burn with some unseasoned logs that nearly sent the burn off of the rails: they smoked to high heaven and seriously compromised the intensity of the fire for a while.  Still, I was surprised at how many incompletely-charred logs I was left with.  I still made huge amounts of good char, but there remains a nice little pile of too-heavy logs to add to my next burn.  I hope to improve on this: next time, I will split all logs into smaller diameters to avoid a repeat of these results.  I didn't think any of the logs were too large, but apparently it pays to be conservative.

UPDATE: After about a half dozen total burns with the two-kiln setup described above, I have a few notes to add.

First of all, the video I originally linked is sadly no longer available.  Here are two new good videos with info on both fabricating and burning basically the same kiln as I described above.  Only note that he cut his open panel out of the opposite side of the barrel than I did; i.e. on top of the larger bung, as opposed to opposite the larger bung, as I did.  No idea why.  Thus, on his design the smaller bung is on the bottom, near to the ground when burning the kiln, which seems to me less useful.

My updated notes:
- I really do like this kiln design.  For minimal capital investment in time and money, I have two simple, durable kilns that have given me multiple good burns and show no sign of crapping out yet.  Surely I will eventually degrade the steel of the barrels and need to replace them, but that looks to be a long ways off.
- Very little smoke is produced using well-seasoned wood.  Once you learn a good rhythm for tending the kilns, and so long as you burn on a mild or even a cool day, running the burn is fairly easy, pleasant, and safe.  No serious smoke inhalation.  Little risk of fire escaping the kilns, even with minimal supervision.  Only once have I had a spark ignite some nearby (8' away) leaves on the ground.  Fortunately I ALWAYS have a garden hose pressurized on hand, and the escaped fire was extinguished in seconds.
- You can skip the step I outlined above involving removing the bottom bung during the pilot burn to provide extra O2 while heating up the kiln.  It works well enough with the bung in, and then you don't have to burn your face off bending down close to re-insert the bung while the kiln is hot.
- As each layer of fuel burns to the desired level of char - blackened wood with a good frosting of white ash; you'll get the feel for it - it is time to add the next layer.  First, rake the coals flat, keeping any larger chunks toward the center of the kiln where the heat is most concentrated.  Then add an armful of small kindling.  As soon as this flares up and the heat is really pouring out of the kiln, throw your larger fuel logs on top to completely cover the burning kindling.  At first they may seem to extinguish the flames from the kindling, but it will reignite, reliably lighting the larger pieces.  This is your rhythm, repeating about every 40 minutes in total, layer after layer.  I find this is the most reliable and efficient way to keep the burn going smoothly, get new wood burning quickly, and prevent most of the wood from burning down too far to ash.  About halfway through each layer's burn, poke the logs a little, repositioning them to keep the largest/least burnt logs toward the center.  The goal is for all logs to burn at an even pace.  Early in the day, pay closer attention to ensure that new wood catches fire quickly and burns evenly.  Later in the day, when the kilns are half full of hot, pyrolyzing coals, it's easy and reliable and less attention is required after a layer is added.
- I have had much better success once I learnt to be conservative with my log sizes.  2.5" maximum diameter.  Anything larger I put through the log splitter before burning.  This way I assure that 1) each layer burns at an even pace; and 2) there is only a tiny portion of not-fully-charred pieces for the reject pile when I empty the kilns.  These are much improved results compared to my first burn.
- The burns go more slowly than I first reported.  Filling both kilns nearly to the top with char will consistently take a good 7 hours or so, from ignition to final quench.  I've only once stopped the day because my kilns were too full to add a new layer; every other time I ended the burn because I'd run out of daylight.  And it would pretty much take just as long were I burning only one kiln at a time, instead of two.
- When quenching the kilns, no matter whether half full or totally full of char, always add water until it reaches the tippy top of the kiln.  You aren't just spraying down the char, you are soaking it.  Drain it the following day.  Anything less, and you risk it reigniting during the night and burning down to ash.  I've not experienced reignition, but I believe it can happen; the amount of heat in a full kiln at the end of a burn day is incredible.
- In my newly linked videos, he doesn't illustrate how to empty the kiln after draining it.  It is quite simple: remove the brick chocks and then role the barrel onto its side, dumping some of the char onto a large sheet of metal or plastic.  I bought a sheet of corrugated PVC like this:
This provides a good surface on which to sort through the char, crunching the larger pieces with your hands, looking for incompletely-charred rejects.  Then pick up the sheet, bend it into a trough, and tip the end into a 5-gallon bucket.  No shoveling required.

Jezreel Valley Farm wrote:I will add - I have 87 acres.  About 25 tillable and a small lawn where the house is it.  In the past three years we have rented a forestry mulcher and removed thousands of small trees.  I'm looking for enough mulch for just this year to cover about 3/4 acre garden and 2 acres of orchard/berry patches.  Next year I will need about the same.  We have a LOAD of large thorny locust and Osage orange which are both very difficult to chip.  I believe I will need to purchase a chipper as free wood chips are currently a thing of the past.

Wow, that must have cost a pretty penny to rent!  Please update us with info about the machine you eventually buy - what capacity, what cost, how it works out for you.  I will be very curious to learn.

Jezreel Valley Farm wrote:I enjoy watching/listening to various trainings that talk about use of wood chips, but my only options in NW Missouri is to either rent one and take down trees on my farm (plenty of trees - it just takes a lot of time to remove the tree, chip it up and then move the chips to where I need them) or to purchase my own chipper.  I am leaning on purchase of a chipper.

Any recommendations would be greatly apricated.

Most unfortunate that your local market conditions preclude cheap deliveries of arborist's chips.

My own property, like many permaculture properties, produces enormous volumes of woody debris.  Ideally, one would leave as much as possible of that biomass unchipped.  Slash, drop, pile, mulch, and let it lay and decompose slowly in place, as it does on a forest floor.  Maximum diversity for minimum effort.  Chipping, in contrast, maximizes effort to gain uniformity of the material, which one might consider undesirable in the strictest permaculture view.

However, there are times when you really want to mulch with wood chips.  And then there are special cases, like myself: gardening from a wheelchair, my entire property would quickly become impassible were I to spread woody slash all around.  Or perhaps one is doing permaculture on a suburban property where a more neat and orderly appearance is a major design objective.

So, I used to chip as much of my woody debris as possible.  I have since changed my approach, instead burning nearly all of it in charcoal kilns to make biochar.  I believe this is less total man-hours of work, plus it allows me to utilize all sizes of wood, plus it provides an end product that I could potentially sell locally at a high value.  But I am only newly down this biochar path, so I will reserve final judgement for another few years and then see how it worked out.

Back to chipping.  I don't know what type of operation is happening at Jezreel Valley Farm and, therefore, what volume of material they are trying to process.  Mention of renting a chipper in the past suggests that they are looking for heavy machinery to process large volumes.  If so, purchasing a heavy-duty chipper, perhaps even a commercial grade machine, might well be a good long term investment.  I can well understand the reluctance to keep using rental equipment; generally speaking, that is never a cost-effective long term solution.

I used to own a residential grade gas-powered chipper.  These can be had at LOWES for $450 and up to several thousand $$.  It was great, but as with all internal combustion home appliances, I quickly tired of needing a carburetor cleaning EVERY TIME I wanted to use it.  I don't know why this is the case these days, but it is.  I have been told that it is the low quality of modern gasoline, or all of the additives in it.  I just know that it wasn't always thus - I recall in my childhood starting up the mower every spring after the winter idle and never encountering the same problem.  And I'm sure my father was careless and let it sit full of gasoline, whereas I always run my equipment dry before letting it sit, but to no avail.

If, like me, one wishes to avoid this hassle, there are electric residential grade chippers available.  They max out at 15 amps on a regular 110V circuit - if there are heavier duty machines that use a 220V connection, I am not aware of any.  Electric chippers can only handle smaller branches up to maybe 1.5", but they are affordable and they do work.  Order a bulk set of replacement blades and change them often.  I have owned several along the lines of this: generic Amazon electric chipper.  Name brand is irrelevant.

For my own small property and limited needs, these were sufficient.  But one must adopt a different mindset: instead of making a long term investment in a heavy duty machine, you are essentially buying a disposable appliance.  With any type of serious usage - as is likely to maintain even a smaller permaculture operation - it WILL burn out and you will end up replacing it, perhaps once a year.  This is especially so if operating on an extension cord, even a heavy gauge cord; otherwise, you will need to haul all of the debris to the chipper, rather than bringing the chipper to the debris, an additional labor step.  This added expense of routinely replacing $100 electric chippers was a factor in my decision to abandon chipping in favor of biochar.

Hope these perspectives prove useful.

J Garlits wrote:This is a great opportunity for me to plug one of my favorite services. It's called "chip drop." Run the words together and add a dot com and you'll find arborists in your area who are willing to dump their chips on your property after they take down a tree or trees. Here are some pro tips to increase the likelihood that you'll get chips sooner rather than later. First, don't be picky...tell them on the form that you'll take chunks of wood mixed in with the chips. I've gotten three loads from them so far, and have never found a single log. It has always been pieces of wrist-sized or smaller partial branches. Second, you can tip them. Yes, they already save money by not having to pay to dump the chips at a commercial facility, but most of the arborists that participate are small businesses, so even $10 or $20 will get the chips dropped at your place instead of your stingy neighbor's. ;)

They don't charge your method of payment until the chips are safely on your property.

The third dump I received was from an arborist who had previously given me chips. He was working in the neighborhood, knocked on my door, and asked if I wanted what he had. It was mostly green ash, and man did it ever smell wonderful. And it was a huge dump. It sat over winter and it's what I'm using in the garden and orchard this spring.

j

Yes!  Chip Drop is also active in my little corner of the American South.  I have received three drops via their website over the years and totally intend to keep using them.  I always throw in a $20 tip, especially if I'm in a hurry to refill the mulch pile beside my driveway.  A very convenient and effective service.

Mac Johnson wrote:One thing I would caution you on will be space. That's a large lot for having neighbors, but once you start planting trees and their required pollinators you'll start eating into your space.  You can grow under trees, but the majority of production garden foods won't do well.  I have shy of 7 acres and am having to plan my space out to make sure I don't mess up with plans for the future.  I recommend drawing out a map of your property and where you want to plant/build what over the next 5 years.  Think about where the shadows will fall once the trees are full grown.  This process helped me winnow away at the things I wanted to do to make a feasible plan that I'm still following some 6 years later (with adjustments).

Excellent advice.  I had to move a lot of earth when building my home, so I started by clearing native forest from all but the edges of my property.  I saved a few original trees in the central area, which at the time were my only shade, but which since have all grown too large and have been removed.  In those early days of a vast, open, mud expanse, I was eager to plant lots of stuff.  Anything to get some shelter for the soil from the sun and rain.  I still habitually call my food forest "the meadow" dating from that period.  14 years later, it is all about fighting for light.  If I had it all to do over, I might do many things differently, but for sure one would be to space the large tree-like elements further apart, especially considering that many of the "bushes" I planted in between would grow as tall as the trees.

I understand that compost trenches are great for encouraging earthworms.  It's a simple concept: "side dress" a garden area by digging a trench adjacent and filling it with compostables up to soil level for the roots to find.  I imagine that you top it off with new compostables as the level inside the trench drops.  I've not done this myself, but it makes sense.

An important thing to remember: the OP mentioned earth worms, specifically, but there is a difference between earth worms and compost worms.  Earth worms dig through the soil, whereas compost worms move through the leaf litter.  The species we use for vermicomposting, like Red Wrigglers, are compost worms.

Gooseberries and currants are lovely, and in he OP's colder (than mine) climate, they should do well.  I've tried different varieties, but they are all yummy.  Better than me attempting to translate my experience in the South to Pennsylvania, find local advice on good varieties if you can.

I've never had success with strawberries, so can't offer advice there.

Yes, you may want to segregate your blueberries to one corner where they can modify the soil chemistry to their singular liking.

Lots of herbs and wildflowers are always nice.  Focus on perennial herbs where you can - sage, rosemary, oregano, thyme, mint.  But also basil is always a big crowd pleaser.  I've found Thai basil grows stronger and bushier than Italian types.

As for cane fruit, I wouldn't necessarily hesitate to guild those with my fruit trees.  Just be aware that, if they really thrive, they will indeed spread and you may need to actively chop back or even uproot the edges of their colony if they stray too far.  But hey, we should all be that lucky, right?  Blackberries now have thornless primocane cultivars available, so you can grow them like "mowed primocane" raspberries.  I have recently planted some such blackberry varieties, so too early to report on progress, but I've seen the system work well with raspberries.  This is a good technique for keeping cane fruits more tidy looking, which sounds like the OP may appreciate.

In case anyone doesn't know...  Cane fruits usually grow first year canes called primocanes that are barren.  They grow tall and sprawl all over, rooting (called "layering") wherever they touch ground.  The next year, new primocanes shoot up and last year's canes, now called floricanes, set flowers, fruit, and then die.  So, a forever two-year cycle of growing and replacing canes that creates an expanding, very wild looking patch.

Primocane-bearing varieties, however, do just that: they set a late crop on their first year canes as well as a summer crop on last year's canes.  You can either 1) enjoy two crops for the price of one; or 2) grow in the manner I recommend and referenced above - prune the tops of new primocanes at 3' to 4' to encourage fruiting side shoots and to keep them from sprawling (a variety with a more upright growth habit will facilitates this).  Late in the autumn, after primocanes have fruited and died back, mow them to the ground.  Repeat this process every year, so that you never get floricanes; only fresh crops of new, shorter, upright, fruiting primocanes.  In doing so, you sacrifice the floricane crop, but you get a more contained, easier to manage cane fruit patch.

If you can, consider burying your IBC rainwater catchment.  It will be out of your way and you can draw water with a hose and pump.  That is what I now wish I had done.

I prefer composting in place whenever possible - look up "Ruth Stout style composting" - but you do you.

I have had great success with sterile comfrey, but be aware it is a deer magnet.  It is often the only thing on my property they browse.  And it will thrive in partial shade, but I've had comfrey die back where it gets too shady.

As always, I recommend goumi berry bushes.  Great permaculture plants that have done well by me - foolproof, vigorous, impervious to pests, nitrogen-fixing, extremely productive.  But if they really thrive they will grow taller than your typical dwarf-to-semidwarf tree.  So, consider planting them as a "tree" in your food forest layout, rather than an accompanying bush.  Or prepare to prune them back severely.  Named cultivars are definitely worth it.