@morethanorganic

Started experimenting today.  Starting small, so that can get a good idea of the making of biochar...if it works will do it on bigger scale.  

Have old wood burning stove.  Filled as if making a normal fire, with main material from pruned tree branches.  Lit the fire and let it take hold, before covering all the opening where the air gets in. 

The idea in making charcoal, is to cut down on the air getting into your burn environment, so you get a smouldering that doesn´t entirely destroy the wood. 

Here in Spain, we´ve got lots of rocks.  I quickly rebuilt the remains of an old fire enclosure to create this:

Then, made a small fire in the shallow pit in the centre, then covered with rocks and left to smoulder.  The result should be something like this:

The Amazonians, wouldn´t have used rocks, but I like to use whats handy.  The next thing to try will be a natural hollow in the land, and this time, I´ll cover the fire metal sheeting and also try controlling the buring with a blanket of fresh weeds .. stay tuned.

Continuing adventures with charcoal:

Used a pit in the ground and covered with an old metal door.  Still far too much air getting in, so threw some earth on the fire.  This did the trick and the branches smouldered and smoked happily:

Evolving what I´m learning from this, the next idea is to experiment with a small fire and try covering it with wet vegetation and / different amounts of earth.   I´m thinking about how the Amazonians would have enabled their fires to smoulder ... possibly covering them with abundant moist vegetation?

It´s not every day, i have moments when things fall into place -- but yesterday....

Was just about to give up trying to make charcoal out of pruned brances: they were proving far too cumbersome to smother the little fire i´d made and the entire thing kept going up in a mass of flames.  Then it hit me:  try a different material: something smaller, that would more easily cover the smouldering fire: VOILA, carob pods.  Carobs are plantiful here.  I picked as many as possible to keep for horses, but there are plenty more just lying about -- they smoked until they were pieces of charcaol --exactly what I´m looking for.  Figuring I´d let them smoulder overnight, I left them, only to arrive in the moring to find nothing but ash.  So now i have a process, a sustainable material and some idea of how to link it all together. 

The next challenge is to scale up the slow buring of the carobs.  This is v.exciting for me.  It means I have a 3 stage way to build soil fertility that i´m in control of:  manuring, composting and biocharing with my own carobs.

Steady on - #biochar engineering watch out!!

Carobs roasting on the embers of a fire

Leave them roast for 3ish hours. You´re aiming for them to be black all the way through..just like charcoal.  When ready, spread them out on the ground and pour water on them.   A few times i´ve left them burn too long, returning to find a pile of ash.

Mixed with manure

Spread out along cultivated strips of land - to be ploughed in.