Fire, but not in the hole

Recently I learned about burying charcoal in your garden as a way to improve the soil. The charcoal doesn't contribute nourishment or decompose (ever!) but it holds water and makes nice little apartments for microbes and root hairs. When the microbes and root hairs flourish, you have fertile soil.

Of course anything natural has to be a lot of work, right? You don't just go burying a bag of briquettes under the pansies, especially not the kind that you can light with a match. Commercial charcoal is laced with chemicals that don't contribute to soil nourishment. (There is a brand out there, that looks like wood-shaped pieces of charcoal, that you can use. But there's a better way; keep reading.)

First, class, a vocabulary lesson. Our word of the day is biochar. It's charcoal made from pretty much any organic material, but mainly things like sticks and paper. Biochar is almost pure carbon, it looks like whatever you used for your raw material, only black, and you can mash it into powder.This powdered biochar is what you're supposed to bury in your garden.You make it by (second word of the day) pyrolizing the material. That means you heat it above combustion temperature without oxygen, so it can't burn. All the parts that can convert to gas do so, and you're left with the leftover carbon—biochar.

So. Something that improves my soil, sequesters carbon, and involves playing with fire and creating flammable gases. What's not to love? I decided to make some.

Step 1. I need a container I can heat a bunch of burnable debris in that can stand the heat and keep out the air. A 55-gallon drum (with lid) is perfect. I punched some holes along one side to let the gasses out. Here's what I ended up with.

I used the cold chisel to punch the holes.

Step 2. Tell you what. Click the RSS link or subscribe to this blog so you won't have to come back to catch the rest of this. You wouldn't want to miss any of my deathless prose, would you? More in the next post.