Biochar: A Better Way To Use Yard Debris!

[Music] [Music] hi folks welcome to bear mountain today today we are gonna do a biochar burn but we're not going to be doing it in the way we've done it in the past with vertically stacking the stuff on an open pit or open pile and basically burning it in this method we're going to be doing what's called the trench method so stay tuned i think you're gonna find this interesting okay the trench method is where i found it was on a youtube channel run by a gentleman he goes under the name of skill cult he has a lot of different types of of uh videos on homesteading and things of that nature but he has a whole series on how he has progressed in terms of trying to make biochar without having to have some kind of fancy retort kiln or something of that nature and he came up with a methodology that or at least he adapted it and and did a really good job of presenting it where he basically is digging a trench that is maybe three feet wide at the top two feet you know wide at the bottom so the sides are angled in and is typically about six to eight feet long and the whole idea is is that by burning in that trench he was controlling the oxygen to the burning fire and as he piled more fuel on top of the fire the coals underneath would be basically starved of oxygen and would create char so he's done a really good job in terms of explaining the system and how it worked and it's actually quite simple it's just like we were talking about you're digging a trench about three foot wide and you're sloping the sides and as you slope the sides you would uh put the material you're digging out of the hole to the sides of the hole till you get to the point where the trench is maybe two feet deep if it's that deep and the whole idea is is is that that controlling the oxygen flow will increase the level of char that's made and lessen the actual amount of ash now the interesting thing about this methodology is it doesn't require a tight stacking like when you're burning on top on a pile you have to make certain the fuel and stuff is stacked very tightly in alternating layers in this case what he's doing is we're taking the materials after the trench is built and we're laying them in and burning them a layer at a time so once the the the trench is full then it's really the same process as when you're burning on top of in a pile you quench it with water to basically extinguish the flame and cool off the char underneath so it doesn't turn into ash or catch on fire that is in essence what we're doing here so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna on this spot where we have an old burn pile is we're gonna dig a trench that's about eight feet long and three feet wide and two feet at the bottom and it's gonna be ultimately when it's finished from the top peak of it to the bottom about two feet deep we have a large amount of blackberry brush and prunings from fruit trees etc on the property that what we want to do is we want to create this char uh as quickly as we can in as large of amounts as we possibly can so that we can get through the brush before the burn season is over and then also also too what we want to do is we want to use this char in our high tunnels to help improve water retention as well as you know give it a little extra home for the microbes in the soil but a lot of it has to do what we're trying to do is increase the water retention so that we can more effectively control moisture in the soil so step one we gotta dig the trench let's get to it [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] okay it took us about an hour maybe a little more to dig the dig the trench out when we laid it out on the ground it was three foot wide by eight feet long so as we dug and sloped the sides in it got a little wider on the top than we anticipated so we ended up with it being approximately about four and a half feet wide at the very very tippy top uh so that's a foot and a half more than we kind of anticipated but i don't think that's a big of a deal it just means we're going to have more capacity to burn in here than we think but the bottom of the trench was definitely at two foot where the slope ends so we've got a pretty good gradient when you look at at the actual trench itself all the way around it's eight foot long and uh it's approximately on the downhill side looks like about 18 oh maybe a little more maybe about 19 deep and on the uphill side it's about 20 and a half so and you know without surveying equipment that's not too bad so we try to make it level because we're on a slope as best we can so we can get a kind of an even fill on it but that's i think it'll be just fine and after we got finished the loose dirt we just went around the edge i went around the edge and i tamped it down with my foot just to kind of pack it in this dirt has a lot of moisture in it so it's not going to be that that big of a deal and it packed down really nice so we've got the trench sloped and ready to go and i think the next step is we're ready to burn and so we got to get all our stuff together and do our first burn on it now what's going to be cool about this trench is it's going to be reusable so after we do a burn and we'll we'll burn all the way near to the top will quench it this is probably going to be somewhere around i don't know 40 40 plus cubic feet of uh of material in this thing if you were to fill it to the top and got you know a really good return on biochar so probably in a typical burn i guess you know i'm just going to be conservative and say we're going to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 35 cubic feet at a pop now when you say biochar at at that kind of volume that will help get enough into our tunnels we want to get all our beds at least a coating in the first inch or two of the topsoil and this should give us after about three or four burns that this should give us more than enough to do our tunnels for this year and we have a lot of brush so we'll see you know how many burns we can get so it's going to be reusable and then when we're finished burning for the season after we've cleaned out the last one we'll just push the sides in and basically it'll bury whatever remnants of biochar are in here and this area will be okay to be used again so next step we go to burn okay so we're ready to burn today uh yesterday we dug the trench got that all settled up now how we're gonna do this is this is gonna be a top burn so we're not going to light from a bottom of a pile but the top of a pile so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to put down some finer stuff i've got some old dried grass and some dried leaves and some smaller dried out older blackberry canes we're gonna line the pit with that in it and uh start the fire with that and then as that begins to catch on fire and grow then we're gonna put smaller twig type stuff over it and eventually that'll get hot enough and then we can start burning the larger stuff and then start moving over piles of the blackberry brush itself once we get a good amount of of coals down at the bottom so the whole process is going to be burning from the top down and then just keep piling it on piling and on piling it on until we get enough of material that we have burned down and burning it any further it's still near the lip of of the pit itself so this is going to take several hours probably um the rest of the afternoon so we probably are looking at four or five hours to do the job and then once we we we pretty much got as far as we can go today then we'll quench it down with water and really really soak it and let it sit overnight and then after that we can just dig it out so i'm gonna start by putting the material in and getting it lit up [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] okay we burned a lot of material here matter of fact just about everything that i had available today that was dry enough to burn that i could get to the pile in a reasonable manner we burned and i didn't fill up the pit i only got about looks like about two-thirds full and i got some oversized pieces that haven't completed burning but what we're gonna do is is we're gonna quench this thing down and and uh anything that didn't burn or was partially burned we'll set aside and we'll use it in the next burn um and we'll see you know how much we get out of it after we quench it it's first thing it's going to do is going to make a huge pile of steam and smoke and stuff like that and and maybe a little fly ash might go up in the air too but we'll try to minimize that and we'll just pump enough water on this thing where it is soaked it'd be think of it just like you try to put a campfire out after you've been you know having a campfire up in the woods and when you're camping so it's the same idea we want to get this thing soaked and soaked fast and stop any more of this gray ash from being built um so that's the next step and then after that it just has to sit for about 24 hours at least at least until it's really really cool and then tomorrow we can come out and dig it out and then from that point it's biochar and it's just like we've done in the other videos in terms of how to inoculate it and charge it and get it ready for use so gonna make some steam so [Applause] okay it's uh still got quite a bit of hot in it but you can see there's quite a bit of borrow char in here there's some oversized pieces but that's okay we'll just sort those guys out some of them some of them didn't burn but definitely the all the blackberry did and so we'll just kind of keep kind of poking this to get uh get the heat out the big like i said the big size stuff we'll just try to burn it again i'm just going to push it back here into the back of the pile still got quite a few pieces that were quite big but still i think in i mean that's pretty deep probably after we get it all sorted out we probably got 15 cubic feet in here maybe some of the big guys this looks pretty good actually i think it's still pretty hot right here when you think about how much blackberry we got rid of this is pretty amazing wouldn't you say yeah it was pretty hot there's some big pieces that just they were too big for what i was doing today so oh that didn't burn that can't be good sometimes you get pockets like that all right we've wetted it down and extinguished it for the most part we'll just keep coming back and wetting it some of the oversized pieces are still kind of hot so i'll just kind of keep you know throwing water on those guys but we got easily 12 inches of biochar here and i'll just uh keep coming back here for the next hour or two and just checking on it i want to make sure that all the water is in it but yeah what we did is we turned four million yards of blackberries off with a lot of blackberries into uh something now that we can use in the tunnels and as we talked about before what we're going to do with this stuff is is the whole idea is we want to increase the water retention in our tunnels to help during the summertime when it is warmer that so we more effectively use the water in the root zone of the plants and this is something that i think we'll be doing we'll be adding it you know the equivalent of probably like one percent a year for several years and this is our first burn on this and to tell you the truth i really thought i would fill this pit all the way to the top with as much blackberry and stuff as we had but i cleaned out what was usable to burnable today and um yeah i ran out of personal fuel [Laughter] but uh i i'm i'm still impressed with how much we got out of it so you know again kudos to a skill cult he he he really came up with a cool idea and it really works and um so we'll be able to dig this stuff out tomorrow we can burn again if the conditions are right um real fast on it i mean if you if you needed to you could clean it out you know probably within a few hours do another burn in it you know if you were so inclined to be so industrious but um i this thing it held up well the sides didn't slough in or anything so um i think we'll get you know the season's use out of it before we'll we're done with it so this is probably if it's a foot deep and like i said the trench was eight foot long and i got maybe two feet on the end here that is just uh oversized material so i'm looking at it probably two and a half feet by six so let's just say 12 by that's two times let's let's say we got about probably 15 cubic feet in here you know which is really good because i got to tell you biochar per cubic foot when you buy this stuff at a supply place can go anywhere from from 20 to 30 dollars a cubic foot so this is just you know a super way of taking what's on your property already have and turning it into something useful so thanks for joining us today and as always i want you to stay safe out there and have a good day bye bye see aunt denise is back [Music] you

Channel: Bare Mtn Farm

Views: 10,553

Keywords: Bare Mtn Farm, Bare Mountain Farm, Bare Mtn, Biochar, biochar production, making biochar at home, trench method of making biochar

Id: HErYRIzWReg

Length: 23min 44sec (1424 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021