You got one right! "Activated" carbon for aquariums (not recommended for any gardening purpose) could lower water pH of the water slightly (until porosity is clogged with impurities in under 15 minutes), but wood or bone carbon -- vis, horticultural charcoal -- when added to soil has no such effect either on water or soil either one. Charcoal is next to inert and changes nothing, at most adds porosity to a soil mix. If the charcoal were to be burnt to ash it could heighten alcalinity, not acidity, if mixed with soil.
Not at all. Ad copy POSING as scientific articles are sent to websites with "science" in their web address titles and used pretty much as-is by the webmasters. They are then encountered by gardeners who actually do attempt to find independent sources not generated vendors, but are easily tricked by these vendor-provided articles to websites supported by vendor ads and so very open to vendor generated articles nowhere on them identified as such. When you see pretty much the same information -- even the same wording -- on five or fifty sites, you know it was vendor-generated. No law requires you to be warned. So you do have to be careful, and it does look to me like you got some of your beliefs from carefully reading disguised ads about "biochar," a term popularized by vendors and about 99% of the time associated with garden ammendment products shipped from South America.
This "biochar" product has only one value: adding porosity to soil mixes. This MIGHT enhance water retention (no better than many another product) and it more certainly enhances oxygen content in soil which PROBABLY assists in microorganism health (to the same degree as wouold ground up tulfa rock or perlite). These are not controlable benefits even in the best of cases, as they microorganism health is not something predictably improved by porosity which might already be sufficient in soil. One of the claims is that because charcoal is inert, it is "better" than organic materials that break down because it doesn't break down so adds permanent porosity.
But the ad-writers muddle this information to make it sound like the charcoal adds nutrients (it doesn't) rather than supports nutrients in the same way as would any porous material, whether inert like ground tulfa or charcoal (and never a nutrient) or temporary in its porosity like bark or pete (which does break down producing nutrients in the process).
SOMETHING has to be broken down by microorganisms for the soil to generate nutrients, so the idea that porosity provided by material that never breaks down is better is highly questionable. And ammendments such as perlite, charcoal, and tulfa almost always reduce the quality of soil in the long run, but a very few studies exist to indicate charcoal assists microorganisms longer than tulfa, much longer than perlite, so vendors can make the authentic if misleading claim that their product is best. When pointed out woodchips would do it better still the answer is "woodchips break down, charcoal doesn't, so is a longer lasting benefit," problem with that reasoning being that the soil MUST include organic material in the process of breaking down and charcoal will NOT cancel out the need for renewal the better ammendments. So the "biochar" vendor gambit is always partially a ruse with just enough truth to it to befuddle the public and permit authentid studies to be selectively quoted to support the ad copy.
I would not personally use a charcoal product for anything but epiphytes in pots, and even then only as a minor ingredient. But such choices are for each gardener to make with the best information they can obtain. I do ukse natural ash however as a weak potash direct in the garden or in the compost heap.
All I've seen is in really small bags, intended for 'sweetening' pot soil. Of course larger bags could be elsewhere. I just haven't come across it or didn't notice it.
No. My main problem is drainage - I've got one part of the garden where I seem to lose whatever goes in there. (Oh muscari are so easy! they said. Yeah right.) So I'll stick with wood chips, zeolite, compost and used potting soil for a while until I loosen it up.
Welcome to the internet. There is a lot of contradictory information out there. For my part, I don't know enough or have enough experience to say whether charcoal would work or not. That recipe is really the only instance I've seen of it being used, and it is being used on alkaline soil.
Do you get your soil tested at all? I'd get it tested before and after just to see what your experiment does in objective terms. Might as well make a science project out of it. Dora
Who knows what burning them converts them into? Easy to make real charcoal, though. Wrap small chunks of wood tightly in foil and toss into the hot coals.
There's no such thing as "charcoal ash" as distinct from "ash." Burnt wood charcoal becomes wood ash. Wood ash has many benefits for soil which charcoal, being inert, does not possess.
The wiki "biochar" article in fact ain't all bad -- it's primary focus on porosity helping the lifecycle of beneficial microorganisms such as beneficial fungus, as would many another soil ammendment, is pretty clear. It fails to note that beneficial fungus even more requires a porous substance, such as decaying wood, to thrive, and charcoal as an inert soil ingredient fails on that score.
Wiki articles are by amateurs and amended by amateurs, however, so really a lot like reading this newsgroup. And the author of the wiki article muddles the article a lot in praising charcoal for "cation exchange capacity" and mistakenly suggesting this increases "uptake of minerals." Obviously copied from some article on water filtration without fully understanding the ionization process, no such process occurs with any type of charcoal mixed in soil.
The wiki article then derails completely in repeating a vendor claim for "terra preta" (charcoal, soil, and ground up terra cota crockery) having a capacity to purify entire rivers, lakes and oceans. This is one of the vendor claims very few copiers of that information copy, as the absurdity is pretty extreme. It closes with the claim that biochar, meaning terra preta in this case, removes "neutralizes" toxins "to an increased ocean pH" (which, if it could alter the pH of entire oceans, would make it about the most dangerous stuff on earth), which really very fabularly confuses two varied vendor whoppers of the highest order of gullibility.
The article that starts well and quickly descends into the most laughable mythology is her:
formatting link
it quick because anyone, including vendor representatives or random true-beleiver gardener, is at liberty to anonymously revise it to be either less inaccurate or more inaccurate any day of the week.
The promotion of half-truths, errors, or outright lies has been very expertly orchestrated by a united consortium of vendors called Biochar International. They hire scientists to run both the organization for athe promotion of biochar products and the same scientists to do research for the organization that pays a sizeable percentage of their annual salary, getting "research" "published" either on the net or in non-peer-reviewed journals, then citing this nonsensical research as proof of all & sundry.
The same industry promotional organization also trumped up the International Biochar Initiative with the purpose of convincing government agencies to buy terra preta (and seem to have successfully hornswoggled the Australian gaovernment out of millions, but the real success will be if they can ever trick the American government into becoming a big buyer).
The very intelligently promotion and growing popularity of terra preta biochar means the stripping of rainforst topsoils as an added exploitable resource after South American forests have been stripped of all plant life and nothing remains BUT the soil. Selling this as environmentally friendly for the garden is one of the modern advertising community's great successes -- kind of like successfully selling panda skin rugs as a method of saving the pandas.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.