Terra Pretta...Charcoal Use in Soil

After reading Bill's posts about Rodale's compost work with leonardite dust and the essay by Rebecca Lines-Kelly that mentioned terra pretta, I started looking into the use of charcoal, crushed or dust, as a compost and soil amendment. Has anyone used charcoal dust or have any thoughts or results?

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Reply to
Charlie
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The value especially of ash and somewhat of charcoal after a forest fire in the long process of a forest's natural recovery is in no way duplicated with horticultural charcoal products, so post-forest fire studies have no applicability in the garden unless you plan to burn everything and let it recover naturally over a great many years starting with a slick layer of liverwort for the first couple years.

Here's an article of mine on horitcultural charcoal as a soil additive:

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's a complex issue but in general charcoal would not be useful or helpful, and for the marginal exceptions, still not the best of all possible choices.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

We have always added wood ash to our root crop efforts. Carrot, Potatoes , sweets and salsify I guess it is because of below info..

It's not that we are that smart but my dad studied these issues hard about 1940 after he burned his garden with too much nitrogen.

Here is an interesting story concerning Potash.

Bill

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Reply to
Bill

There are some interesting articles on this site. It's a Canadian company working in conversion of biomass into energy.

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Reply to
bungadora

Funny you should mention this... I was just reading news headlines at sciencedaily and found this:

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think I should read up on this a bit more and maybe try some in may little plot. Thanks for the links. Chas

Reply to
debnchas

Supposedly good to place a layer of charcoal in the bottom of a pot, where it absorbs toxins such as from root rot due to overwatering.

Reply to
Father Haskell

It's looking good to me, the more I read. A confluence and consensus of ideas. Hmmmm...interesting.

Charlie, just another Chas ;-)

Reply to
Charlie

This is not about ash or post-fire studies. This is about torrified biomass incorporated into the soil. Read the articles and investigate and you will see the difference.

about activated or horticultural charcoal.

This is not an option amongst multiple choices. This is a singular issue I am investigating, and it's effects.

Reply to
Charlie

Thanks Dora

Useful indeed. This is quite new to me and seems to hold much promise, this issue of biochar as soil "rejuvenator". Cripes, I thought I was sorta on top o' things. ;-)

Years ago Mother Earth News had plans for, and drove around the country a truck that ran on wood gas. Same principle, though they were benefitting from the wood gas.

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

=46rom what I recall, they haven't yet succeeded in recreating the terra preta soils. Bio char comes close, but the fertility only lasts a couple of years whereas the actual terra preta soils in the Amazon just keep going and going.

I read a bit about terra preta after having gone to a talk on antique roses given by Odile Masquelier (sp?) last fall. She uses charcoal in her compost recipe linked to the site below. If nothing else, the garden pics are worth a boo.

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'd recently read about terra preta in 1491 by Charles Mann, so did a bit of reading for a while, then it was Christmas. Plus I got stuck on NPK but that's another monologue.

My understanding is that biofuel/biochar producers are going after the agricultural market because farm soils have been depleted of carbon with the use of nitrogen fertilizer. (Not sure how this works or if I got it right, but I read it somewhere so anyone wishing to enlighten, please do.) However, there is a problem with distribution. No way are cheap farmers going to pay the price for hauling and applying large amounts of biochar (they have to do that by machine). I think they should be selling it to horticulturalists. All they'd have to do is bag it, sell it by the overpriced bag, and we'd dig it in by hand. We'd ask for more if it worked even if we didn't need more and maybe even if it didn't work. Dora

Reply to
bungadora

OK. I think my problem here is one of terms. What exactly is biochar? Does charcoal, chunks of charcoal produced in a retort qualify as biochar?

What I had in mind, was simply the crushing of oak lump charcoal ($4 dollars US/10 lb bag) and screening it to no larger than 1/8 in, utilizing dust as well as the small particles. I'm looking at long term soil improvement and this seems to fill the bill.

Damn, this is turning into a major thinkfest. :-)

But, the way I am thinking, this will do no harm and any benefits derived are accomplished with little effort upon my part.

Am I missing something?

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

Biochar is produced as a result of pyrolysis, which as far as I can figure out is at higher temperatures and faster than the process used for producing charcoal. Biofuel is produced as a result of the process

- I think we'd need a chemist to explain why. However both biochar and charcoal are produced without oxygen and both processes produce carbon as an end product.

Take a look at that compost recipe on the labonnemaison site. I was thinking of doing much the same, but I'd probably end up having to pound up charcoal briquettes.

Yeah. It makes me wish I'd paid more attention in chemistry. I only get so far with this stuff and then my head hurts.

Well start small. I've also read that charcoal can have an effect on soil pH. Dora

Reply to
bungadora

I don't believe charcoal is biologically available carbon, any more than diamonds are (although it IS a lot cheaper! :-). Charcoal is some of the most durable stuff nature produces -- archaeologists can carbon date the unburned, charred pieces of wood from ancient campfires thousands of years after those fires finished cooking their venison. The charcoal just doesn't decay.

I put the ashes from my charcoal grill into the compost pile. Sometimes a largish half-burned briquette will end up slipping through my fingers unbeknownst to me and end up in the pile. Once the compost is deployed in the garden, these tend to float up to the surface slowly with rain and time. They are always just as good as new when this happens -- I let them dry out and then chuck them back into the grill for burning next time. Despite being soggy and buried amidst billions of otherwise hungry bacteria for long periods of time, first in the compost pile itself and later in the garden, they show absolutely no sign of decomposition, so I don't think they can be doing the plants any good (or bad, for that matter).

Kevin

Reply to
Kevin Cherkauer

Absolutely does not do this. Water cycled through activated charcoal (of the sort used in aquariums) has a filtering lifespan of about fifteen minutes, then does nothing. If mixed or layered into aquarium gravel, it does nothing, not even for fifteen minutes. If mixed or layered into potting soil, it does nothing.

Horticultural charcoal is a completely different form of charcoal. It is inert, has no nutrient value. It does absorb toxins. It's one and only benefit, if mixed into soil, is porosity keeps some oxygen in the soil. It does not filter waste, does not acidify or purify soil or water or oxygen, does not prevent disease. It might, only might, hold in a tiny bit extra moisture. The limited value is better met with perlite, bark, or peat. It's benefits to plant is slight to zero, though epiphitic plants may get some benefit from charcoal and other inert substances by right of not needing much in the way of soil nutrients.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

The article isn't just about container gardening. And just because wood charcoal & soil. is shipped up from South America doesn't make it magically different from horticultural charcoal in soil. The same scientific realities do apply.

The amazon rain forest product being shipped to American rubes is forest fire charcoal mixed with dirt. It has no magic properties except in the imaginations of rubes who buy it at premium price. It's not magic charcoal different from any other wood-based charcoal.

"Scientific" promoters of the rain forest charcoal product, such as Dr. Mingxin Guo, work for the product manufacturers. He dazzles rubes with phony jargon like "biochar" to give it all a mystic-scientific feely-touchy tone, provides non peer reviewed articles to sundry marginally scientific websites who all run the same photographs & variants of the same text, but it's entirely ad copy for a product with no distinctive properties that would separate it from any other mix of soil and charcoal. And to assess the value of charcoal requires no special considerations for the fact that it's from South America.

Now and then Mingxin Guo's "data" says something true, such as about charcoal "persisting in soil for hundreds to thousands of years." Like perlite and plastics. But when he twists this data to indicate that inert ingredients improve organic soil content, bare in mind when the organic content is charcoal, it is totally inaccessible for use as a plant nutrient -- for thousands of years.

The true value of charcoal no matter the brand or ad copy attached is for its porosity. Its worthless as a filtering agent or nutrient, and displaces rather than contributes to the nutrient content of soil. Stop mistaking ad copy for valid information.

-paghat the ratgirl

Reply to
paghat

Not a good idea then. The accelerant and lignite might be a bit of a disaster. Dora

Reply to
bungadora

Why would you assume that I would think shipping this from SA is in any way a good idea and why would you assume that I assign magical properties to this?

See above response.

I supplied other links to research other than those of Dr. Guo. And once again, I am not speaking of charcoal from SA.

To which "ad" do you refer? It appears you are being a bit presumptuous about my mental acuity.

Reply to
Charlie

And this is why I proposed using lump charcoal, which is nothing other than oak chunks turned to charcoal in a retort.

And to think, BIlly used to cook over this stuff, ;-)

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

Sounds like a plan. Even though some have misgivings about the efficacy of using charcoal, at the worst, I can see no harm. I see Billy set the record straight on briquettes. Do you all have lump charcoal there. Royal Oak brand is what we have available here.

Did you see the recipe that Bill posted a while back on what roday was doing, adding gypsum, clay and leonardite coal dust to compost and the ability of the resulting compost to better retain nutrients?

Yeah, same. I often base my ideas on getting a consensus of a bunch of articles and research, some of which I scarce understand. Of course, there is the danger of making the data fit the intended results. ;-)

I am assuming that the lime in the recipe balances the pH effect of the charcoal.

Care Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

Uh......so....what are you saying? This appears to be a good thing or a bad thing or no thing a'tall?

It is a cool word, though I hope it doesn't attract the attention of The Watchers. ;-)

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie

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