While I've heard of people using briquette charcoal - which "melts" easily in water - I would recommend using lump charcoal instead which is basically just pieces or lumps of wood that had been charred while briquettes are made of charcoal powder that's been compressed with a binder into their final shape. Making your own is easy if you have a steel drum - heck, you could make some in a smoker for that matter. Just gotta get it real hot in there, then cut the oxygen and let the heat cook the wood. I've even collected charcoal from the local deli that uses hickory sticks in their electrically heated smoker - perfectly charred and ready for powderizing. Powderize it really well - a fine powder has many many times the surface area and exposed pits for microbes to park and start processing and storing nutrients. It is an interesting concept of putting carbon back into the soil! If it gets popular with farmers, we may even be able to reverse the carbon cycle we've started by burning fossil fuels...
Be Well,
Mike
Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeReal
In California, the organic matter in the soil "literally" burns up. So every year they should be replaced. Even the bark chips decomposes rapidly when in contact with moistened soil.
There is Coconut Husk Chips which are very good amendment and last several times than redwood bark chips or peat moss. They are still too expensive to obtain. They provide perfect aeration and they can store water at more than 5 times their weight. These are renewable resources.
Another wonderful amendment is wood charcoal, preferrably in powder form. If you have heard about amazonian black soil or terra preta, the first step is to incorporate powdered wood charcoal into the soil. Charcoal do not degrade, even for several thousand years. It helps aeration, increases fertilizer efficiency, provides better habitats for beneficial microbes, and others. This means that you wouldn't waste a lot of water and fertilizers. It takes 3 years to reap benefits of adding charcoal into your soil. But the greatest advantage of using charcoal is that you store carbon forever, meaning you will literally reduce the amount of carbon dioxide from the air. Plants sequester the carbon from the air via photosynthesis, now you make charcoal out of the plant material, put it in the soil and trap it there forever, helping solve our greenhouse gas problems.
http://citrus.forumup.org/viewtopic....&mforum=citrus
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/l...aPretahome.htm
http://www.innovations-report.de/htm...cht-55516.html
http://www.newfarm.org/columns/resea...charcoal.shtml
http://www.geo.uni-bayreuth.de/bodenkunde/terra_preta/ |