What is Biochar and how is it made?

This is a question we've been researching and answering lately.  In short, biochar is pulverized charcoal that has been inoculated with something good for plants.  Biochar starts with pure charcoal - not store bought briquets (briquets have other chemicals added to make them bind into that shape, so it is not suitable for biochar).  The charcoal is then pulverized and mixed in a solution with plant food.  Some things that have been used successfully to inoculate are compost tea, sea minerals and urine. 

Why would you want to put biochar in your garden?  The biochar is almost 100% carbon and has a microscopic structure that is full of pores.  Carbon is very reactive and very stable, so soil nutrients bind to it easily and stay in place (less leaching).  The pores then form the perfect habitat for microorganisms that take the nutrients and make them available to plants.  Because of the stability of carbon in this form, it remains in the soil for hundreds of years providing this service.  Talk about a good bang for your buck!

If you want to see the potential for biochar enriched soils, look no further than South America.  The famed Terra Preta soils of the amazon were built from biochar and remain some of the most fertile soils in the world despite hundreds of years of farming.

So now that you're sold on adding biochar to your garden, how do you get it?  The short answer for now is by making it yourself.  Its not widely commercially available.  Fortunately, it isn't hard to make.  I would recommend this site:  http://biochar.info/biochar.biochar-production-methods.cfml  They have a pretty good resource for different ways to build a biochar stove/kiln.

Thanks to a good friend, Michael Morley, loaning us his biochar burner, we will be experimenting with making our own soon.  The process with his burner goes something like this:

1.  Load the burner with small diameter wood bits.

Brushy bits to break up

Michael loading the burner

2.  Build a small fire on the top layer and light it.

3.  Put the top on so that the draft begins up through the barrel.

4.  Wait for the fire to reach all the way to the bottom of the barrel then shut off the vents at the bottom and top to stop oxygen from reaching the fire (note the dirt piled up around the base now to block air flow).

5.  Let the wood sit in the very hot barrel and char for 20 minutes or so (longer if the pieces are bigger).  Open the vents and pour water in to quench the fire (notice the water on the lid and steam rising from the barrel).

 

6.  Dump out the contents.  Separate any unburned bits from the char ash (they can be run through next time to finish).  You have char!

We blocked the air to the fire too soon on this load - lots of things were left unburned.  We'll know better for next time!

Back in the saddle...er...mud

After a wonderful break for the holidays, we're back at it again.

We spent a glorious day at the farm working on the future garden spot.  This is actually the first step toward building the house for reasons that will become clear soon (hopefully).  It was a great day and we were serenaded by several hundred Canadian geese that were grazing and flying in the field next to us.  We also got to slog through some lovely mud, but the day was nice enough to ignore that.

see all the dark specs - they're geese!

We started by measuring and staking the corners of the future hoop house so that we had a reference point for both the garden beds and the garden fence (both of which have to allow enough room to erect the hoop house at some point in the future).

Me on one end of a 100' tape measure, Jeremy and Jacob on the other

Once we had that, we decided where the corners of the fence would be and Jeremy started digging the holes for the massive 10' poles that will hold the corners.  He also moved the large poles into each location.  Now, this presented one particular problem - some of these are large enough to be very difficult even for Jeremy to move.  What we needed was a truck.  What we had was a hatchback car.  Which leads to one and only solution...

Looking at the bottom of the last hole...is it deep enough?

Yep - that's deep enough (those would be the post hole diggers halfway in the hole).

Meanwhile, the kids and I measured and staked the locations for all the garden beds.  Jacob did an excellent job of pounding in almost all the corner stakes while I measured them out and started building beds.

After a short break, the kids shoveled topsoil into the wheel barrow so that I could spread it on the future beds.  We put some straw from our stash down first to add organic matter.  This ground has been run over with a large excavator to compact the soil (part of making a level pad) and its all clay subsoil from the hill behind the existing hoop house.  While that isn't exactly a recipe for a beautiful garden spot, it is no worse than what we started with in town.  We have been here before!  On the plus side, the topsoil is beautiful and not compacted and we have ample soil ammendments to help improve the clay.  The site is also right next to our water spigot and gets full sun all day which should help overall.

Kids tearing into the mountain of topsoil

We had enough time to dig all 4 corner posts for the fence and to put down straw and the first layer of soil on 2 and a half garden beds.  We'll keep working our way through it this week and see where we end up for Saturday!

Here are the first 2 beds with the rest staked out.  We finished putting the dirt on top of the straw before we left.

Rocks and seeds

We finally made it back out to the farm after the holiday break today.  We started by helping a friend put up another pole for his pole barn.  All went uneventfully thanks to excellent preparation on his part and we were all grateful.

Then we spent a couple of hours at our farm.  We walked where the house will go trying to narrow down from "around here" to "right here" for where it will be.  We also took a walk back through our woods to see how much easily available rock we could find (lots).  Then we dropped off some more accumulated building materials and picked up the light fixtures and seed trays for our seed starting this year. 

Most of the afternoon was spent at a seed ordering/discussion gathering where I learned about some new seed companies I'll have to check out and where I met (and re-met) some awesome people who are trying to grow more of their own food too.  Community is a wonderful thing!

This evening we assembled our new seed starting stand shelves (just wire shelves from home depot).  Tomorrow I'll make a quick run to pick up the chain we'll hang the lights from on the stand and we'll be ready to start some seeds!  With a little luck, our onions and leeks will be started before the end of the day.

I cannot express how happy I am to be starting seeds again.  It is such a joy to contemplate digging in the dirt again!  Soon spring will be sitting in my living room embodied in hundreds of little plants all reaching for the light.

Sorry for the lack of pictures - the camera came along but got lost in the excitement.  ;-)

2012 wrap up

In the spirit of the new year, I thought I'd take a minute to look back and what 2012 has brought our family.  It was quite a year!

• Dismantled and moved two 96' long hoop houses in January
• Found our 40 acres in February
• Closed on the farm in April
• Removed our city garden in May
• Purchased an RV and moved it to the farm
• Got the tractor running!
• Built the first hoop house on the farm in June/July
• Purchased, stacked, restacked and stored 200+ straw bales for a house
• Made 3 trips to Colorado to pick up logs and milled lumber
• Milled many logs at Tim O'brien's
• Cut and brought home cedar logs from Arkansas
• Found and moved 16 tons of rock (with much more of this to come)
• Transplanted many plants from town to the farm
• Planted first 12 fruit trees on the farm
• Had Bowen excavation level the pad for the second hoop house
• Moved into and out of 2 storage units
• Put the house on the market FSBO, listed it with a real estate agent and then took it off the market

That's quite a lot when you consider that we both have jobs, we have 2 kids with their own activities and we do sleep occasionally.  Here's hoping that 2013 will be just as productive!

Christmas means....CANDY!

At least at the Lehrman house, that's what it means.  We've been making an assortment of candies for Christmas for several years now.  Today was the big day for getting that done (a week or two behind our normal schedule, but who's counting?).  Jeremy made him amazing fudge and candied nuts.  I made divinity and peanut brittle.  There will likely be another batch of divinity and another batch of fudge yet this year, but this gets the bulk of it done.

In other news, we've planned out where the garden will go for next year and we're hoping it will be close to the size we removed from our house in town.  The veggie mix will focus on things that don't need daily maintenance since we likely won't be living at the farm full time for the entire garden season.  Some things we're just going to grow for seed for the following year due to their harvest requirements (green beans fall in this category - we likely won't have the hours needed to pick, snap and can or freeze them this year, but we can grow out enough seed to plant a big crop in 2014).  We'll have our garden mainstays though - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, chard, onions, garlic, leeks, spinach, celery, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, corn, black beans, cabbage, broccoli, green peas, melons and some other things.  It will be wonderful to have fresh vegetables again!

Along with the usual garden planning and seed selecting, we're having to devise a fencing strategy.  Not only are there plenty of deer and cayotes on the farm, but our neighbors have wonderful free range ducks and chickens that would also love our veggies.  Since we hope someday to have our own ranging poultry, I'm not complaining at all!  Just pointing out that we have to be realistic about where we're at.  ;-)   Many options are being discussed and weighed against each other, but we haven't landed on the exact right solution yet. 

There will be more details on this upcoming as we set up our seed starting stand again and go through the renewed annual rythm of the garden.  I can't wait! 

Resurecting the greenhouse

Since we'll be staying in our house until Spring, we decided to put our mass driven home greenhouse back into production.  This is a process since we had removed all of the "mass" from our greenhouse which rendered it much less temperature stable that we would like.  Here's how the process went:

First, we went to the farm to pick up the six 55 gallon plastic water barrels that go along the back wall of the greenhouse.  These provide the thermal mass to prevent the greenhouse from freezing.  They are painted black to absorb as much solar energy as possible on sunny days (thus heating the water) and they release that heat slowly through the night and on cloudy days.  The greenhouse itself is very insulated on 3 sides (north, east and west) to retain this heat.  While we were at the farm, we picked up the shelves that sit on top of the barrels and provide a convenient grow bench.

Second, we unloaded the barrels and lined them up in the spots in the greehouse.  This involved rearranging a few things, but was pretty quick.

Third, we started filling the barrels.  The water will start out around 55 degrees which should be warm enough to prevent a freeze anytime soon.  This step took forever since we had about 330 gallons of water to add.

Filling the first barrel

Lastly, we put the shelves on top of the barrels and moved the potted plants already in the greenhouse up onto the shelf.

Shelves lined up

First shelves on and plants moved in

Sometime in the next week or so, we'll start filling trays of soil and planting greens.  By past experience, we should be able to eat salad from the greenhouse all winter long, although it will take several weeks before what we plant is big enough to start eating.  We plan to plant some root crops (carrots and radishes most likely) in the front planting bed also.  I can't wait to have food growing again!

We are also trying to figure out what kind of garden we can handle for next year.  I would dearly love to have a garden the size of our former home garden, but we aren't sure if we'll have the time to tend a garden that size while building.  There are several things that will have to get settled in our lives before we make a final decision so for now I'm happy looking through the newly arrived seed catalogs and dreaming of what I could grow. 

More Cedar!

Its taken me a bit to get this posted, but the Tuesday after we got back from Arkansas with the first load of cedar trees, Jeremy and Scott went to pick up another load from a gentleman south of town.  He is clearing several acres of cedars from his property and we offered to buy the trunks from him for a reasonable price.  his aren't quite as long or as large as the ones we got from AR, but some of them are pretty nice.  Most will make great fence posts if nothing else.

Anyway, the upside is that these are much closer to us.  The down side is that there is no equipment to help load the logs.  It took everything Jeremy and Scott had to get all these loaded onto the trailer (as well as a come along and a litany of words I will not be re-typing here).  Thank goodness for awesome brothers!

The loaded trailer

One of the bigger logs - about 16" across

The unloading, of course, went much more smoothly.  The little ones were dropped off at the farm and the big ones were unloaded at Tim's with the excavator.  One of these days, we'll get to mill them into the appropriate timbers.