The Mystery of confirmed biochar improvement

I have been adding biochar to my food forest for years now. On some plants, I have noted spectacular gains from it. My pie cherry trees and Szukis American persimmon have improved immensely.   Doubled to quadrupled in both quantity and quality.  Others have greatly improved, but I can't be sure that it's from the biochar.  My plum trees produce way more fruit and way better quality than before, but I'm not sure it's from the biochar.  It has also gotten noticeably hotter and drier the past few years.

This year, my mulberry tree is making way better tasting fruits than ever before. I've had it for about 15 years.  This year is one year after biocharring it.  I find that if I biochar around the dripline of my tree during the growing season, it doesn't affect much during that year. Last year's mulberries were mediocre.  I guess that could make sense, as I was digging into the dripline of the tree as they grew.  They most often improve starting the next year.  

Has anyone else noticed a particular plant, crop, bush, or tree growing better because of biochar?

John S
PDX OR

John,

Did you enhance your biochar with compost or anything or was it simply char when you threw it down?  I am asking simply out of curiosity.  It may be that if it was char that was thrown down that it needed a year to get inoculated with the biology to become effective biochar.

Eric

Most fruits create the fruiting buds on the pervious year, so it makes sense that you will not see a bigger fruit set until the next year. Bio-char also takes a while for it to be colonized by the local/good microbes and also for the bio-char and the root-mycelium to connect. I can also see the bio-char taking a while to equalize it's mineral-organic compound cycles.

I need to do more testing with bio-char myself.

I do have a question for you. Do you make your own bio-char and at what temperature do you make the char, an for how long do you innoculate it and what do you add to innoculate it.

As I have posted on here, I do make my own biochar.  I built a TLUD out of a 55 gallon barrel and a chimney from Restore.   I crush it for a week between two panels of plywood.  Then I inoculate it for 2 weeks. I drench it once a day with a mix of urine, seaweed, worm castings, regular compost, rotten fruit, rotten wood mycelium, ag lime, and one cup of whole wheat flour.  I agree that it would probably not help the plants too much right away yet if it hadn't been crushed and inoculated.  There is just too much evidence on that.  I've developed most of my procedures just by reading all of your posts and developing my own method which fits my lot and my available resources.  So, thank you everyone who has posted to help me and everyone else to develop their systems that work best for them.  

Still hoping to get some feedback on improvement for specific plants.  I chose persimmon and pie cherry first because they were documented to prefer more alkaline soils than mine. We have naturally acidic soils here.

John S
PDX OR

I can’t attribute any specific improvements to biochar as I am also adding other amendments (urine, bone char, compost) but pH increases from the biochar can allow the plants to access several micro and macro nutrients previously tied up by low pH.  This is an often overlooked benefit of biochar.