STOP BURNING BRUSH!, Make Easy Biochar, Every Pile is an Opportunity!

about to torch off this file behind me to make charcoal that will soon be 75 200 gallons on guessing of charcoal that I can put in my garden we'll talk more about that presently but for now just stop burning brush stop it stop burning your brush into ash it's so easy to make charcoal by the methods I use that you know all you need is some water in a match it's almost that simple it just rained really hard for 24 hours I parked that off right before the rain to make sure that the center of the pile is driving so I have a pile of hitch wood here also people call it fat wood it's fine actually for in this case saturated with tree resin so it burns super hot I'll start a fire in the center with that and we'll talk more I got deluge all right so I have a really fat wood here this is extremely rich fat wood it's just saturated with resin so that's great that's where we're going to do the job but I'm going to lay these pieces down first it's kind of a platform they get the fire going but you know we pinch with this pitch wood it's just so easy to start fires I mean this is just as you can see look at that it's just solid sheet of resin scraping off some of the wet stuff [Applause] just might be right in the middle here this stuff is outstanding just water dripping down my leg I got so much water in my pocket that it's it's actually there's a puddle of water in my pocket but this stuff will burn so well see if my lighter has any life left in it and it also catches very easily you know hitch would comes in different grades and this stuff is really high grade and that's going to go for you know a long time so I think really just this much here with those slabs I put on there which are also quite rich actually is going to get this fire going pretty good I'll be throwing other stuff on top of it too so just to give you an idea how this goes I just had to reset up the camera probably took me close to a minute look at that crazy remember I said it just rained for 24 hours well this I just harvested all the sweat on the outside but it's so full of resin that it doesn't get saturated with water but it's already saturated with water proof present [Applause] did I mention stop stop burning your bra every breast files an opportunity there we go you'll notice that I stacked this file pretty carefully it's you know relatively vertically sided versus this being a big amount like we just keep throwing stuff on and I also Kristen acted like sax on this way and then some this way and some that way from this way kind of law cabin style is that this a really a fit that fire like they've burned really hot and really fast because with the arrangement of the fuel now we'll talk about that another time I got to move subside of my heads getting really hot alright let's talk for a minute about biochar and why you could do this the only thing that's like a little bit more work than just learning a regular brush pile with this is stacking the wood carefully and you don't have to do it I just prefer to do it overall it's just not that much more work than burning broth you'll also notice that there has been just almost no smoke that's because it's lit from the top so all the gases are coming from underneath and traveling up through the flame and getting flared off very different than lighting it from the base or lighting it and then throwing stuff on it which also works ok so this is a pretty much of superior system just for burning bark files in general you know like them from the sauce got the burns peaking out here so let's talk for a minute about what this means so we're looking at 75 to 100 gallons of charcoal like I said so let's say for math take it 75 there's about conveniently there's about seven point five gallon you've exploited so that means we're going to end up with ten cubic feet the yard is 27 cubic feet so it's about a third of the yards a little more than a third of the yard so let's say we want to amend a soil in our garden like a garden bed it flow into the at 10% so if you've seen my videos on my leak the leak that were the biggest were in the country suspect and the one for the five-person section was clearly bigger than the zero present session and the bureau's were like zero there were zeros not heroes zero zero so 10% in my garden really picked from but that means that we can do a garden bed 100 square feet near 12 inches deep 25 feet by four keys and remember this determinant we amended permanently amended if you have ten of those in your garden which is a big-ass garden for most people that 10 bar files like this and you're done amazing stop burning the brush about it all that there's another method I use with a trench it's really great too and it's good for different stuff like less brushing kind of stuff I use both methods depending on what I've got to burn so stop it about that topic stop burning your bra make Sparkle whatever interview is whenever I can get in there kind of burned a hole in the middle because it's so wet on the outsides I guess I'm going to have to go put some of that in and once it's burned up to where I think most of its charcoal I'll get a full like a long pole and get in there and kind of like stir it up and get anything that's buried inside the charcoal that's not able to burn that still is in fart all the way get that on the surface I might do a little managing to get it all burns or I might just leave some of it for the next file that'll take a hose and put it out and I'm done it was actually raining hard this morning so first our waited a little bit longer looking out okay - I'm going to throw this stuff into the middle or Barbie quenching that's within 15 or 20 minutes if my ultimate might have been a little generous they're just kind of looking more like 50 or 60 Allen's to me I'm just going to tend this a little bit the main thing I want to do is get under here and see these pieces that aren't burned all the way I get those out sometimes it happens a lot sometimes it happens only a little bit and again I'll have to get everything burned but I don't want too much left over like this it's a lot so fat on the wet ground that there's still stuff under there that's not at all burns and all in all I still probably only spent you know ten minutes total of actual working time attending this fire so if that burns into 15 or 20 minute not that and this is the not a very well behaved pile as they go this is a least well-behaved file I've ever burned like the Middle's is totally not burned on the bottom I mean all the workouts going to take a little bit of time that I'm just going to you know tease that around a little bit to burn up the last pieces of brush there's a little bit in the center there where there's a lot of leaves next end it didn't burn we might just scoop it out separate and throw it on a tree or something pretty soon it'll be time to just clench the whole thing I want to punch it really thoroughly and I'll probably break it around a little bit to make sure that it's completely out because if I pile it up and there's still one little burning ember in there I'll come back to a big crater you can see various pots of smoking that's completely dried just you know maybe four or five inches under the surface it's going to require quite a bit of watering you know that's one thing about this method if you can't get a hose in you kind of got a problem and then as I put it in the wheelbarrow I'll probably spray it a little bit more to make sure everything's out there's a hot spot right there and that's it I'll let you know how much we end up with right this pile here is probably a little bit under 45 gallons and I have another file that's about 30 gallons but of mixed leaves dirt and charcoal is probably 1/4 1/3 charcoal so we're looking at maybe around 50 gallons total most of the piles I burn and that size yield more like 70 plus gallons but I think I just spent a lot more time trimming the brush in this case trimming it down smaller and then taking the big stuff away to burn in the trench system but in retrospect that doesn't really make that much sense because it's easier to do it here if I can burn something in leaf pile that probably should because it's fast and I don't have to move it and I don't have to trim it and all that so in the future I'm probably going to look at being pretty careful to leave everything that's about 2 inches and down for this system and then the bigger stuff will haul off for the other trench system that I use we were to buy that it's about 6.6 cubic feet $30 a cubic foot at Home Depot that's 180 190 bucks a short morning of stacking and of course mining and burning that probably took me the Holderness option took shot two hours probably from start to finish and I wasn't working the whole time you know I wondered off a few times and stood around a lot that's like that I don't know what it takes for you guys make 190 bucks but for me that's a no-brainer and it's why it had more wood like I spent less time trimming I would have gotten more charcoal for the same amount of work as you know I did and if you build a big pile it doesn't really take that much longer to burn out and process it and manage it and it does to burn a small pile now if you were to take this and put it in a garden bed so you had 50 hours in wishing yourself for by 16 or 17 foot bed amended to 10% the 10% section of the bed that I showed the leeks in this year I would say four to six hundred percent more growth in the tempers and biochar than the zero percent biochar so that's four to six times as much food out of the same that forever here I'm saying wherever your lifetime the next person's lifetime the person after that the person after that person after that and we're talking 2,000 years or more unless you know the soil washes away or who knows what could happen obviously in thousand years but you get the idea nothing else I know of is going to have that kind of effect in a soil it's just stop you know it just frustrates me so much to watch people burning brush into ashes I friends around here and just like stop you know stop burning your brush just make charcoal light it from the top and spray it with a hose it doesn't have to be perfect you can lose half of it you know like by managing it poorly or something like that we're still going to end up with a bunch of charcoal and a lot of the soils around here just aren't that good we have thin mountain soils we're not you know we're not gardening in these deep valley soils that are you know have built up over time with the best stuff that washed out as a mountain here but we're dealing with a little myself decent but you know it's never going to be super rich unless I do something like this and what else is like this nothing that I know so yeah I hope I drove the message home well enough stop burning your brush make charcoal it's just a TV you can see my other videos on this method and the trench method which I really like a lot too and you can also just you you can stack other would like boards and pallets and stuff you can just stack them like this in a big Rick light them on the top let them burn down you know manage them a little bit square a mobile hose it's that simple if you have pallets are going to be nails but just take a magnet and run it through the charcoal and you're done and should pick up on the solder mask I don't know how it's gonna work in your soil you know I mean it's worth the gamble though everything I put in is that has you know had time to get established he's done better than anything you know any control that's around it and with the results of other people and the Terra Preta soils and African darker soils and other old accounts and stuff I think you can hardly go wrong with doing some experimenting if you have wood that you can burn and a place to burn it I know that's the limitation for some people but the kelpie Wilson's backyard biochar website and she has all kinds of stuff on how to do it in your backyard some of the methods grease very little smoke but anything that you can char you know rotten wood old boards without as long as they don't have you know tank on them and stuff like that char it chorus and bury it in your soil and see what happens and we all have this kid revolt because I've been having I just want as much as I can possibly get with this coin so all right stop stop edge this one's 33% so it's basically a third maybe 30% about a third you can see how easily friable it is very very friable

Channel: SkillCult

Views: 812,502

Keywords: biochar, charcoal, making charcoal, burning biochar, making biohar, how to make biochar, how to make charcoal, easy biochar, biochar methods, charcoal as a soil amendment, burning charcoal, easy charcoal making, burning brush, burning brush piles, forestry, does biochar work, how long does biochar last?, what to do with brush

Id: ixtxNfU9Rb8

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/dr0ps]

Funny how he talks about not burning brush all the while having this huge burning fire in the background.

[u/djkswiss]

Doesn't hugelkultur sequester more carbon than biochar?

[u/Baumbadil]

People have marked this for its possible SPAMness. I chose to ignore these requests because this is a perfect time for someone to rustle up a good resource for a permaculturalist creating Biochar. r/biochar is in our sidebar though...

Anyone? Please discuss/advise

[u/truckerslife]

I push bush piles into wash outs, or use them on edges as habitat for both plants and small animals.