I live in the Hudson Valley, Upstate NY. I planted a garden last year and added some home made Biochar (made from my FabStove from Blue Sky Biochar). It was only a small amount. I had to leave for the summer and the person I had arranged to water it didn’t and we had a month with almost no rain. The only plants that survived (barely) were the ones I had planted with some Biochar. This year I’m adding more, some home made, along with home made bone char, and some commercially made Biochar from a kiln. I suspect this year will be better than last.
Does bio char give space for micro organisms to grow due to its porosity? I was considering adding some char to my compost to be used in organic container grows next year. Should I be not expecting much difference besides the water holding capability?
Hey soil scientist! Biochar IS in fact charcoal, created in the absence of O2. The only difference in the description of biochar is that it has been charged with nutrients. Charcoal absorbs water and nutrients to become 'biochar'. Charcoal only forms in the absence of oxygen. As for soil being 'dead', real soil is sand, silt and clay which is mineral and completely 'dead'. Plants get nutrients from the duff layer on the surface but the roots live I what you call dead soil. Charcoal is a younger element in soil but also does not decompose as a solid form of carbon.
The most interesting part of this video was that the Tera Preta soil is a uniform 3 meters deep. That indicates that there was a civilization with enough people or technology to do this on a large scale. It further feeds into the idea that there was a very advanced civilization before the younger dryas impact. A question I have on the topic is if resources weren't an issue, what would you need and how long to replicate the areas of Tera Preta? I really appreciate you not only explaining all of this in a palatable form for soil noobs but also being passionate about it!! Thank you!
This is one theory. You also can get to the same result with a civilization that wasn't large, but stayed in roughly the same location for hundreds if not thousands of years passing down their landfill hole knowledge of dig/fill/move over a few feet to repeat. This would explain the large sections in the Amazon that are all roughly the same depth. Multi generational knowledge and time.
The problem with believing in old dates and science is this. Science carbon dates things assuming that carbon breaks down and that carbon levels are similar over time or something. If three thousand years ago the atmosphere was totally different with way more water and oxygen and carbon plants could grow way bigger and it’d screw up all dating techniques today. Also you don’t need thousands of years to make biochar the depth they did in the Amazon. They’ve done tests of adding charcoal to the ground and digging it back up a few years later and found charcoal did go or travel down the soil level. Charcoal can migrate so to speak. Also there’s tons of videos. I remember watching a farm in the Amazon burn bananas etc. they made cone shaped pits and burned it until it was all full of coals. I don’t really think the charcoal in the Amazon were just waste piles etc. if people farmed there which I’m assuming they did as satellites have shown water structure and canals in lots of jungle areas. If tribes farmed then they’d have lots of plant debri to form charcoal each year. Native Americans in the U.S. did yearly fire burns which ends up making some charcoal as it doesn’t all go to ash. Some say Iowa has black soil from fires over thousands of years. Whether or not it’s man or natural it still results in charcoal.
Thank you for having this channel and nerding out. I avoid the hoopla part but I do enjoy hearing it second hand. I don't think I have the stomach for direct exposure though, so thanks for that. :)
The way I understand why Amazon soil is so poor is this: because perfect temperature and perfect water, plants grow so intensively, so fierce, nutrients are dispatched so fast from the forest floor that there is no time for them to sink lower into soil. The action is so fierce that plants are being eaten alive before being decomposed. In every other soil on Earth the nutrients have time to sink into soil before being "dispatched", (to a various degrees).
@@GardeningInCanada some gardeners who promote char are making good observations with homemade char. One farmed such soil that compost disappears into without a trace and adding the char has stopped that process of instant loss. I dont see anyone addressing my soil's opposite problem of cant drain due to compact impermeable clay and so i am kind of on new ground as it were, trying to learn something from preta and apply it to my problems.
@@lostpony4885 your soil is too rich in nutrient/mineral which is bonded together so you can only add rock, sand or other inert matter to improve drainage. I don't know to what depth your problem exists for me it was over 12 feet of clay and there was little I could do for that soil. I think large amounts of char might help much the same way volcanic rock like perlite would. lots of wood chips or other organic matter can also help to dilute the binding effect of the clays and allow better drainage. For you in a gardening situation I'd advise raised beds with Much imported material mixed with some of your soil.
This made me consider the traditional controlled fires that my tribe in Northern California have done since time immemorial. In places around the Klamath River, you’ll find the richest of black soil, and everywhere there are fruit bearing trees and plants that grow like nothing you’ve ever seen (there’s a reason Humboldt is famous for its plants, yeah), I wonder if instead of waiting for natural forest fires, controlled forest fires may be the answer here too?
I’m in Crescent City and the local Permaculture Guild has started a Biochar initiative which I’m excited about. Inoculating Biochar is the key aspect of its potential. I’m coming around to realizing that I need a decent microscope to better understand what is going on as far as microbes to get the best results.
I live in a farm where we do controlled burn lines to prevent wild fires burning everything. Those lines are worse off from frequent burning. The ground is very hard in those areas. Controlled burns are done in cooler conditions so there is probably more oxygen available to the fire would be my guess.
In NY, it was said by Europeans that there was pine forest from Albany to Buffalo that you could walk u fee like a park. It was said the natives did burns to clear the under forest. And the soils here have been incredible.
7:48 i’m watching this video again in 2024 after a lot of new recent discoveries about the Amazon using LiDAR and several new archaeologist finds including more finds at current sites. Lots of new Peer reviewed studies are available it’s getting very interesting!!
I live on a farm where we have about 100H of invasive black and silver wattle trees😢 it is a massive problem and head ache to clear. They would be ideal for bio char though. The nice ones are used for the timber industry but there is still so much waste and if you don't have a contingency plan it grows back like hair on a dogs back. Am going to try some biochar and see if i can do something with it. Bio char has also some very other interesting "high value" applications it can be used for.
Biochar has positive impact, always. It's just that not everybody knows that you have to inoculate it in compost and mix it properly with the soil, not just dump it in lumps. And no sane person is gonna put biochar 3 meters down, that would be extremely hard and would take extreme amounts of biochar.
With bad dirt it is very helpful to fluff it up down to 1 meter in dry climates. I could easily imagine that after a few 100 years of growing that you might end up with 3 meters of soil.
@@DouglasEKnappMSAOM Yes! That's exactly what I'm doing for the past several months, down to 1.1 meters to be precise, and this year's harvest shows that it's the best depth (heavy clay soil based on limestone). BUT, do not put it in the top 16 inches of soil because you will get excessive evaporation (very important, unless you get daily rains or something). I learned it the hard way last year. Plus, for limestone-based soils one should also add (yellow/green) sand for silicon and other inorganic minerals like Iron that limestone is poor in.
Problem with theory one is that forest fires happen in Australia , we have similar terrible soil and there's no terra preta , the australis terra preta is very limited and only found around aboriginal midden sites
I disagree. I held an experiment last season in 20 gal air pots. I used Master Marks supersoil recipe (google it). In master Marks supersoil blend he calls for 20% biochar, 20% clay pebbles, 20% worm castings and 40% ocean forest potting mix (plus other things). I took a 30lb bag of natural lump charcoal, crushed it up and inoculated into bio char (I used a bichar inoculation recipe from a big biochar supplier in Hawaii). Anyways, One pot was straight supersoil no biochar added and the other had 20%biochar added. I grew pruden purple tomatoe plants in both pots. I watered them both with my own mineral water: filtered water with 5 pinches of rock dust and 5 pinches of sea 90 (quarter strength) per 5 gal of water every other week and straight fungi dominated compost tea the alternate week. The 20% biochar kicked the shit out of the none biochars ass in every way. The one without biochar had less yield, was less vigorous, and tasted like a normal farmer grown quality tomato. The plant with 20% biochar was bigger, stronger, more vigorous, had double the yield and bigger fruit...and it tasted absolutely amazing (like it should have been entered into a taste contest) The depth of flavor was vast. Why? More Biology was in the soil which allowed more nutrients and minerals to pass into the fruit. I also drought and heat tested them... The biochar kept on producing amazing fruit and the non biochar wilted and died. I highly suggest holding your own experiments/ research before telling the public biochar is for sandy soils only. The owner of that Hawaii biochar company is growing in 80% inculcated char and 20%compost...no sand needed.
Thank you so much for sharring you experience... gardening is an art more than a science,... you have to do it !Then you`ll have the feeling of what to do next...If you and I can figure out a better tasting and life giving tomato... imagine what a million amazonians have learned in thousands of years...
The real golf secrets Thanks for the info. I agree. You must experiment. I used biochar for raising beets and it made a big difference. That and I used mulch on top. Mulch and biochar made a big difference. But look up fungal dominated compost tea. I’ve read a lot or listened to lots of videos. I got hundreds of pounds of compost worms now. I do vermicompost and add it when I’m planting plants in the garden. Well I need to try vermicompost tea but just figured cause I used totes of the stuff I’d probably be good. I just cut a IBC 500 gallon tote in half. I fill it with compost and cardboard and soak it. Last year I had a problem cause the cardboard caused it to not drain at the bottom so I had to drill holes. But making large quantities of vermicompost isn’t to hard if ya got the land and a year or so for things to degrade and worms to work. Ya probably should cover it with grass or straw to try to save the worms in the winter. But that’s I do. And then in the spring used a horse manure fork to sift out clumps or shake the vermicompost so it’d be small Particles. I can’t afford a big shaker. Oh anyways i heard from a video fungal dominated tea doesn’t work like bacteria dominated tea. In bacteria compost tea the bacteria literally can grow in the air rated water and ya add unsulfured molasses. But fungal dominated tea doesn’t let fungal actually grow like bacteria cause fungal doesn’t grow in water but roots of plants. I suppose using fungal dominated compost to make a tea lets you spread the fungal stuff onto plants but the fungal or fungi won’t grow in water like bacteria. So you might be better off adding the fungal compost tk the roots as you plant. I tried a few mychorizal products a couple years ago before I had biochar. I probably should try that again.
I have experimented with biochar for my bachelor thesis. Biochar without innoculation performed the worst, the other formula has no significant improvement but one recipe outperformed even chemical fertilizer. The most interesting part is I used fungal insecticide to innoculate the plant and plants with biochar responded the best to innoculation.
Awesome video as usual, i usually add wood ash around the base of plants in the Autumn, there are always bits of charcoal mixed in, not bio char, just normal charcoal, i was wondering if normal charcoal has any pro's or cons?
Normal charcoal is a bit different in the sense that’s it’s difficult to make a homogeneous mix. But very similar properties in a lot of cases. Keep in mind too much is possible with both and can result in some issues.
The bits of charcoal your adding around your tree's is what people call uncharged biochar, in this state it will act like a nutrient sponge and absorb surrounding nutrients for around 1 year until it is sufficiently charged up and full then it will be a slow release feeder of those nutrients.
The soils are probably more uniform because they are created by slash and burn, id be willing to bet that the charcoal isn’t dug in, it’s just the accumulation of thousands of years of slash and burn cycles on the same piece of land. The milpa agriculture system is a fascinating method. They would clear and burn the area, then use it for annuals a few years while the trees and bushes regrow, they would select trees with useful traits and cull others. When the trees began casting too much shade, they would move onto the next piece of forest. This is why there are so many arguments about the Amazon being a man made garden that was consciously created. Because in a way it was. Just not how we think. It’s the the product of a slow accumulation of humans living as part of the ecosystem. Not just some sudden digging in of metres of charcoal. That is what I’m willing to bet, anyway.
Here here. I find it hard to believe otherwise or these sites are simply flood plains or something. I am of the understanding that there are sites that are manmade with pottery and whatnot in the mix but I would think this would just be a garbage pit that eventually it was figured out was fertile. The thought that they used huge kilns to make biochar and then evenly dug it in across the land just seems like an unneeded overengineered thought.
Do the research to see how they did it and no we can't re create it without being in that exact area where that soil and those bio char from plants growing at 6000 ft elevation and the the nematodes that in habit that land and so on and so forth. The environment as a whole including all human waste pottery or in physical form plus animal waste. Remember those canals were also home to all sorts of fish which helped form the sludge they still grow on today. I'd love to get my hands on the real soil
Phew, you did it again, you did it again. You have provided so much information to chat about! I have already cancelled 3 comments! Each one had a minimum of 5 paragraphs!
@@GardeningInCanada Terra preta has had many hundreds of years sitting, aging, conditioning, charging, being inoculated. Which are the three main aspects to "good biochar." We can't just make it then throw it into or on top of our soils to expect benefits. Glacial erosion and the sediments and such that were produced is a fascinating subject. I may add that it may not be a linear progression or a cyclical one. But I think that the large bodies of water were produced in a violent manner. Such as a huge iceberg breaking off causing catastrophic damage.
16:33 The Amazon soil they typically use the term ADE’s but they’re not the only dark earth soil found on our planet you can find them on just about every continent they’re even found in The plains with clay soil, thought to be created by indigenous tribes that once lived here. Different dark earths soils have different names. And then on top of that there are different soils that have very unique properties to them like Loess soil or even termite mounds have very unique properties that have been used by many indigenous cultures to create anthropogenic soils. I am not saying biochar is for everyone I’m just saying we found man-made soil‘s that contain biochar all over the world and it’s pretty fascinating.
Hi, i live in south east British Columbia. My question is does a fine sand glacial rock soil that receives a good annual percippittation tend towards sufficient available minerals for plants, or not? Thank You.
I have to fall on the side of man made. When you consider the origin of the concept and ask who discovered the charcoal effect on better growth also what other benefit did the charcoal have in that time era. The possibilities as I imagine them are this... As large groups of people settled in permanent areas human waste became an issue (whether the medicine man discovered the link or just the stink was the issue) they were collecting the waste in clay jars to be dumped away from the living areas and some bright person discovered that charcoal when applied to stinking messes lessened the stink. So it became part of the practice for a time of the sanitation crews to add charcoal to the waste area. Now in the course of time others noticed the vigorous growth in and near these waste collection areas and decided to use this waste as a soil amendment in the crop areas. But this is of course all just a wild guess...However you have to remember that these people of this time were just as intelligent and inciteful about their local conditions as we are today, in different ways of course but the same mental capacity we have today. and they had a couple thousand years to both figure this out and make it work on a large scale.
Terra Preta is not just char. It is also pottery sherds and nobody has yet examined the pottery component very well but its not even randomly mixed in but arranged in ways that seem deliberate and to my eye its purpose is to create an internal hydrocycle. 3 feet thickness isnt going to work without a moisture distribution/lifting system and the pottery provides this. Im creating some for my garden which is nonporous clay that makes any dig into a big bowl that holds moisture and creates anoxic rot. Im firing that clay and building an understructure of it; have high hopes for a deep living oxygenated soil i cant have without it.
I have seen videos of people using unglazed clay vessels for creating time delayed "self watering" systems in gardens and landscaping. I have wondered if the pottery fragments are remnants of some type of irrigation. I have also heard that Amazonian people smashed clay pottery as part of ceremonies. It's such a wonderful puzzle and treasure hunt.
Super video. Hoping to use inoculated/charged biochar in my silt/sand fields plus other organic matters. Been mulling over setting in +1meter plugs of a 'terra preta' blend .
I've seen at least one vendor equivocating biochar with terra preta, and I don't like it one bit. Biochar is one element in a complex recipe for terra preta that we don't really understand, and it seems that ancestral knowledge has been lost. With biochar it does have to be charged with water, nutrients and microbes in order to be useful. If you don't charge the biochar then it's likely to spend a lot of time soaking up nutrients from the soil before it eventually starts helping. I've read that it can take months or even years for that to start happening. Even before you charge the biochar, there are questions about how to develop beneficial microbes in the compost or other medium, using bokashi or other fermentation, aerobic decomposition, burying boiled rice to develop the indigenous micro-organisms, or other methods. I don't agree that the soil you have is just what it is, and that's the hand you've been dealt. If that were true, pretic anthrosol wouldn't exist as we understand it. We also wouldn't see examples like Ernst Gotsch in Brazil, Geoff Lawton in Jordan, and we wouldn't see the opposite - monocultures turning fertile land into barren dirt. Land can be transformed by intelligent application of human intervention, through the use of plants, animals and microbes.
Gardening in Canada could you do a video on geo-injectors (soil injectors here in the Americas). they have it over in the UK and often use biochar for injections. im wondering what your thoughts are on both the geo-injector idea as well as their use of biochar in those compacted soils.
Very interesting video, I am a new gardener who has been learning about soil over the past 3 years. This year, I burned 4 giant pits into biochar, and have laid them out on the soil with amendments to charge the char. I have a garden plot near Guelph Ontario, and this former cattle farm land has horrible hard clay which bakes to a rock-like consistency under the summer sun, and traps the downpours for days and weeks at a time. I had hoped the char might help it, but heard you say that in a clay soil, it might result in killing all the plants. In a quick answer, could you tell me why that is? Thank-you for all the amazingly insightful videos!
It’s highly debated. Soil scientist are split between mammals and naturally occurring. But they are not split between the benefits it provides to the natural soil in the area
10:04 wouldn't surprise me if it lasted long enough for the roots near the surface to actually carbonise from the heat tho i suspect if you actually got the soil that hot is would also sterlise it so maybe not
Yes farms are huge most of us need to go out and stand in the middle of a cornfield to grasp just how huge a volume of Preta would be required to change its composition overall.
Ashley, if you have come up with a way to replicate the Terra Preta soils in the Amazonian Basin, we need to connect as I will be moving to southern Oregon to turn ranches for sale into food forests with permaculture, and we will need as much Terra Preta as we can come up with.
So what if I told you there was actually something similar that would probably do you better than trying to replicate the soil‘s of the Amazon, the thing is is when we tried you specifically fall of the Amazons recipe often times it’s doing more harm than help because it’s a completely different soil type. But over the years lots of natural farmers have come along and written books and those natural farmers have learned from other natural farmers and they’ve created something called career natural farming in these practices you can learn to have self resilience when it comes to agriculture and put the power back into the hands of the farmer you’ll be able to create things called indigenous micro organisms with five levels to it and the fourth level being a combination between regular old soil and all of the knowledge passed down from microbes to that soil the idea and concept of the Amazon terra preta soil to quite literally replicate itself can be done with Korean natural farming methods. I recommend looking into Chris Trump as he is the most trusted person to teach upon the subject he has a multitude of free videos there’s tons of information from peer reviewed studies like Cornell university the Institute of Hawaii I’ve read a few hundred papers on Google scholars and there are plenty more available options from the original creator is creating books that have been translated to English and much more.
The tera preta is pretty easy thing to do if you do as Mexicans do. Since I am in Oklahoma and have different ingredients do a little different spread about 10 inches of wood chips them enough truck loads of cedar brush of well dried wood. Have had 40 mph winds being drawn into it and temps 800 10 feet away. Where I learned from Mexicans and Navajo way a mat of sage with ether mesquite or cat pinon pine brush over depends on elevation
At the very end you said that adding Biochar to loamy soils was something to regret; can you elaborate? My theory (untested) is that Biochar must be inoculated to be of any real benefit.
I enjoyed the discussion. Thank you for that. I had a question considering the the root system in the Amazon. Is it likely that the root systems are at a depth of 3 meters prior to the fire and subsequently the bio char is 3+ meters due to burning at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen? It is logically assumed that old rainforests untouched could have that much diversity of growth over Eons. I’m just trying to get a basic understanding. Thank you for your time.
Another excellent video !! This is a fascinating topic and the applications seem beneficial. The studies I've heard about seem to have varying opinions on the benefits, especially in varied soil, it's texture and structure. I realize this is a difficult question to answer but what would be the balloark cost of soil testing on a 5 acre piece of land ? Great and thought provoking video ;) Cheers Jason and Colleen 🌱🌱🌱
Depends on how many samples you take, rather than how much area you survey. A soil sample is usually several pieces of soil from an area all combined, to represent the area, e.g. 5 holes 30m apart, and these are combined in a bag and that's your sample you send away to get tested. This accounts for patchiness in the soils, so you are not just over representing one type of soil. If your soil is quite similar across the 5 acres you may be able to take just one sample, but more likely you could take 5 samples from across the property (each sample being from 5+ individual holes) to get an idea of the variation. You could pick different soil type to get an idea of the variation on the property, e.g. take sample from both the most fertile and less fertile spots, and the driest and wettest spots, and then you can see the likely range of variation present. So the answer to your question is not something she can answer, you need to go to a lab that does soil analysis and find out how much they charge. You would need to know what you want to test for but there should be a standard test with a standard rate, and the cost to test your site is the number of samples you want tested times the cost of testing each sample.
Thank you so much for your videos! Watching "Gardening in Canada" to get great info about fixing my Florida sandy soil is funny. I've watched a number of your videos and wanted some advice. I wanted to ensure I understood your advice on sandy soils. Would you recommend trying biochar and taking a more "No Dig" approach to gardening in sandy soil? What would you recommend as a good bed mix that I am trying to build? A 4-inch Top Soil with wood fines and 1-2 inches of manure compost? Or something way different?
I would skip the the wood and go with the top soil that has 1-2 inches of cured and aged manure compost. So a sandy soil you want to go no dig as much as possible. When you water make sure you are fertilizing as well.
@@dalemulert Another Floridian here. I'm in the panhandle zone 9a close to the beach. I have almost pure sand and get 60+ inches of rain per year. A year before I started my vegetable garden I piled up a 50/50 topsoil/compost mix a foot high with pine straw bales as a border to hold it all in place. One year later it was half the height. That's how fast the organic matter 'disappeared'. For a couple of years I added more compost every year but it was never enough. About 2 years ago in addition to compost I started adding small amounts of bentonite clay and charged biochar and it seems to be helping quite a bit.
@@DC-rd6oq Interesting, I did add some biochar to the beds when I made them this year with the topsoil and manure compost. It's free and easy for me to make the biochar, so I just went for it when I was building up the beds. How much clay are you adding ratio-wise? I agree it's amazing how fast the organic material disappears here. Thank you for your advice.
No one size fits all, The desert soils of the south of SW USA are devoid of organic matter, so any addition of organics, carbon add to the Cation Exchange. I have great success of adding organics, charcoal, be it chips, hay, manure the Alluvial Fan that we live on now is a jungle, with not much watering, the monsoons now absorb as compared to running off, and earthworms are thriving.
Haha! That’s a really good question. It’s a very delicate systems that relies entirely on cycling on nutrients. If one component is missing the system collapses.
@@GardeningInCanada hmm. where does the cycling of nutrients come from? Dead animals and trees rotting on the ground putting nutrients back in? Nutrients from the rivers leeching into the soil banks
At 9 minutes you say the forest becomes biochar. My understanding is charcoal isnt biochar until it's colonized and innocuoated with biology after a forest fire the biology of mycorrhizae will not come back on its own it spreads by contact only. I make biochar but don't consider it finished untill it's a complete soil food web inoculated with all the microorganisms. I never use charcoal on sandy soils I lived on the beach and a tablespoon clay per sq meter added to water is enough to retain water for days.
This is a good article describing the different between all the possible cases. From activated carbon, biochar to charcoal. Biochar is specifically made under pyrolysis char-grow.com/biochar-vs-charcoal-vs-activated-carbon
enlighting, I am sad that terra petra soil(s) are all magical and likly not easily repeartable. I enjoy the facts and presentation, thank you. will subscribe.
Not from the studies I read. The majority were biochar and Amazon soils. Such as this one www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/terra-preta
17:01 I would have to disagree with your statement there are publishing‘s from the University of Hawaii and Cornell University showing how you can take Korean natural farming methods and essentially put that soils “DNA” onto a soil that is completely devoid of life and pass knowledge unto dirt, sand, etc. seeing is believing and practicing natural farming for the last three years I’ve quite literally watched soil go from dust to living soil using the process of IMO.
I think the soil was man-made I watched a video with a few native made it teepee like structure with logs and green matter and boulders on top of it set it on fire from inside and make biochar.
Why isn't this obvious? People found charcoal in the soil as a result of forest fires and that it worked well for them, so they replicated it manually.
Terra Preta seems to be an example man's understanding and imitation of natural process. The fact that the pockets of terra preta in the Amazon are amidst an actual food forest would be a large coincidence
I’m getting chaotic in parts of my yard. After a decade of being scraped bare by a moron, I have outstanding geology but not a lot of biology in my dirt. I’m planting a huge variety of different plants in the soil. That’s how I get biology beneath the surface. Roots making exudates baby!
Biochar and Charcoal differ in that Biochar is made at higher temperatures than Charcoal. Charcoal has a lot of resin left in it for additional burning a flavor profiles. Good Biochar has very little resin left.
pfft you are definitely right. I just read a thing on Mayans and how the deforested their area which messed up the cenota's and ultimately caused their demise.... not the best farmers
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I live in the Hudson Valley, Upstate NY. I planted a garden last year and added some home made Biochar (made from my FabStove from Blue Sky Biochar). It was only a small amount. I had to leave for the summer and the person I had arranged to water it didn’t and we had a month with almost no rain. The only plants that survived (barely) were the ones I had planted with some Biochar. This year I’m adding more, some home made, along with home made bone char, and some commercially made Biochar from a kiln. I suspect this year will be better than last.
I enjoy smart people that love soil structure and explain processes for improvement.
I can really dig it.
So glad we're getting back to our roots too.
Does bio char give space for micro organisms to grow due to its porosity? I was considering adding some char to my compost to be used in organic container grows next year. Should I be not expecting much difference besides the water holding capability?
Definitely increases the surface area and therefore micro organism, water and nutrient sites
Hey soil scientist! Biochar IS in fact charcoal, created in the absence of O2. The only difference in the description of biochar is that it has been charged with nutrients. Charcoal absorbs water and nutrients to become 'biochar'. Charcoal only forms in the absence of oxygen. As for soil being 'dead', real soil is sand, silt and clay which is mineral and completely 'dead'. Plants get nutrients from the duff layer on the surface but the roots live I what you call dead soil. Charcoal is a younger element in soil but also does not decompose as a solid form of carbon.
Do you really think that she doesn't know that?
Would appreciate if you could link the research paper weblinks in the description. Thanks for snother great video
The most interesting part of this video was that the Tera Preta soil is a uniform 3 meters deep. That indicates that there was a civilization with enough people or technology to do this on a large scale. It further feeds into the idea that there was a very advanced civilization before the younger dryas impact.
A question I have on the topic is if resources weren't an issue, what would you need and how long to replicate the areas of Tera Preta?
I really appreciate you not only explaining all of this in a palatable form for soil noobs but also being passionate about it!! Thank you!
This is one theory. You also can get to the same result with a civilization that wasn't large, but stayed in roughly the same location for hundreds if not thousands of years passing down their landfill hole knowledge of dig/fill/move over a few feet to repeat. This would explain the large sections in the Amazon that are all roughly the same depth. Multi generational knowledge and time.
The problem with believing in old dates and science is this. Science carbon dates things assuming that carbon breaks down and that carbon levels are similar over time or something.
If three thousand years ago the atmosphere was totally different with way more water and oxygen and carbon plants could grow way bigger and it’d screw up all dating techniques today.
Also you don’t need thousands of years to make biochar the depth they did in the Amazon. They’ve done tests of adding charcoal to the ground and digging it back up a few years later and found charcoal did go or travel down the soil level. Charcoal can migrate so to speak.
Also there’s tons of videos. I remember watching a farm in the Amazon burn bananas etc. they made cone shaped pits and burned it until it was all full of coals. I don’t really think the charcoal in the Amazon were just waste piles etc. if people farmed there which I’m assuming they did as satellites have shown water structure and canals in lots of jungle areas. If tribes farmed then they’d have lots of plant debri to form charcoal each year.
Native Americans in the U.S. did yearly fire burns which ends up making some charcoal as it doesn’t all go to ash. Some say Iowa has black soil from fires over thousands of years. Whether or not it’s man or natural it still results in charcoal.
Thank you for having this channel and nerding out. I avoid the hoopla part but I do enjoy hearing it second hand. I don't think I have the stomach for direct exposure though, so thanks for that. :)
HAHA it’s the red hair. They say we are soulless so nasty words from a screen don’t really harm us much
The way I understand why Amazon soil is so poor is this: because perfect temperature and perfect water, plants grow so intensively, so fierce, nutrients are dispatched so fast from the forest floor that there is no time for them to sink lower into soil. The action is so fierce that plants are being eaten alive before being decomposed. In every other soil on Earth the nutrients have time to sink into soil before being "dispatched", (to a various degrees).
That’s true too. But it’s also very porous soil so we don’t get the ponds or depressions that hold water
@@GardeningInCanada some gardeners who promote char are making good observations with homemade char. One farmed such soil that compost disappears into without a trace and adding the char has stopped that process of instant loss. I dont see anyone addressing my soil's opposite problem of cant drain due to compact impermeable clay and so i am kind of on new ground as it were, trying to learn something from preta and apply it to my problems.
The Amazon is comprised largely of slow growing plants and trees.
@@lostpony4885 your soil is too rich in nutrient/mineral which is bonded together so you can only add rock, sand or other inert matter to improve drainage. I don't know to what depth your problem exists for me it was over 12 feet of clay and there was little I could do for that soil. I think large amounts of char might help much the same way volcanic rock like perlite would. lots of wood chips or other organic matter can also help to dilute the binding effect of the clays and allow better drainage. For you in a gardening situation I'd advise raised beds with Much imported material mixed with some of your soil.
This made me consider the traditional controlled fires that my tribe in Northern California have done since time immemorial. In places around the Klamath River, you’ll find the richest of black soil, and everywhere there are fruit bearing trees and plants that grow like nothing you’ve ever seen (there’s a reason Humboldt is famous for its plants, yeah), I wonder if instead of waiting for natural forest fires, controlled forest fires may be the answer here too?
I’m in Crescent City and the local Permaculture Guild has started a Biochar initiative which I’m excited about. Inoculating Biochar is the key aspect of its potential. I’m coming around to realizing that I need a decent microscope to better understand what is going on as far as microbes to get the best results.
I live in a farm where we do controlled burn lines to prevent wild fires burning everything. Those lines are worse off from frequent burning. The ground is very hard in those areas. Controlled burns are done in cooler conditions so there is probably more oxygen available to the fire would be my guess.
In NY, it was said by Europeans that there was pine forest from Albany to Buffalo that you could walk u fee like a park. It was said the natives did burns to clear the under forest. And the soils here have been incredible.
Your ancestors had multitude of beaver dam created wetlands as well. European trappers killed them off for their fur.
7:48 i’m watching this video again in 2024 after a lot of new recent discoveries about the Amazon using LiDAR and several new archaeologist finds including more finds at current sites. Lots of new Peer reviewed studies are available it’s getting very interesting!!
I live on a farm where we have about 100H of invasive black and silver wattle trees😢 it is a massive problem and head ache to clear. They would be ideal for bio char though. The nice ones are used for the timber industry but there is still so much waste and if you don't have a contingency plan it grows back like hair on a dogs back. Am going to try some biochar and see if i can do something with it. Bio char has also some very other interesting "high value" applications it can be used for.
Biochar has positive impact, always. It's just that not everybody knows that you have to inoculate it in compost and mix it properly with the soil, not just dump it in lumps. And no sane person is gonna put biochar 3 meters down, that would be extremely hard and would take extreme amounts of biochar.
With bad dirt it is very helpful to fluff it up down to 1 meter in dry climates. I could easily imagine that after a few 100 years of growing that you might end up with 3 meters of soil.
@@DouglasEKnappMSAOM Yes! That's exactly what I'm doing for the past several months, down to 1.1 meters to be precise, and this year's harvest shows that it's the best depth (heavy clay soil based on limestone). BUT, do not put it in the top 16 inches of soil because you will get excessive evaporation (very important, unless you get daily rains or something). I learned it the hard way last year.
Plus, for limestone-based soils one should also add (yellow/green) sand for silicon and other inorganic minerals like Iron that limestone is poor in.
Please do a note in depth series of soils and their various properties across Canada!
OOO i love that!
I love ancient history and I love dirt. I like the video. Informative.
Resume at 8:30 , thanks for thiw thought provoking chat
Thanks, that was a good presentation
Glad you liked it!
Problem with theory one is that forest fires happen in Australia , we have similar terrible soil and there's no terra preta , the australis terra preta is very limited and only found around aboriginal midden sites
I disagree. I held an experiment last season in 20 gal air pots. I used Master Marks supersoil recipe (google it). In master Marks supersoil blend he calls for 20% biochar, 20% clay pebbles, 20% worm castings and 40% ocean forest potting mix (plus other things). I took a 30lb bag of natural lump charcoal, crushed it up and inoculated into bio char (I used a bichar inoculation recipe from a big biochar supplier in Hawaii). Anyways, One pot was straight supersoil no biochar added and the other had 20%biochar added. I grew pruden purple tomatoe plants in both pots. I watered them both with my own mineral water: filtered water with 5 pinches of rock dust and 5 pinches of sea 90 (quarter strength) per 5 gal of water every other week and straight fungi dominated compost tea the alternate week. The 20% biochar kicked the shit out of the none biochars ass in every way. The one without biochar had less yield, was less vigorous, and tasted like a normal farmer grown quality tomato. The plant with 20% biochar was bigger, stronger, more vigorous, had double the yield and bigger fruit...and it tasted absolutely amazing (like it should have been entered into a taste contest) The depth of flavor was vast. Why? More Biology was in the soil which allowed more nutrients and minerals to pass into the fruit. I also drought and heat tested them... The biochar kept on producing amazing fruit and the non biochar wilted and died. I highly suggest holding your own experiments/ research before telling the public biochar is for sandy soils only. The owner of that Hawaii biochar company is growing in 80% inculcated char and 20%compost...no sand needed.
Thank you so much for sharring you experience... gardening is an art more than a science,... you have to do it !Then you`ll have the feeling of what to do next...If you and I can figure out a better tasting and life giving tomato... imagine what a million amazonians have learned in thousands of years...
The real golf secrets
Thanks for the info. I agree. You must experiment. I used biochar for raising beets and it made a big difference. That and I used mulch on top. Mulch and biochar made a big difference.
But look up fungal dominated compost tea. I’ve read a lot or listened to lots of videos. I got hundreds of pounds of compost worms now. I do vermicompost and add it when I’m planting plants in the garden. Well I need to try vermicompost tea but just figured cause I used totes of the stuff I’d probably be good. I just cut a IBC 500 gallon tote in half. I fill it with compost and cardboard and soak it. Last year I had a problem cause the cardboard caused it to not drain at the bottom so I had to drill holes. But making large quantities of vermicompost isn’t to hard if ya got the land and a year or so for things to degrade and worms to work. Ya probably should cover it with grass or straw to try to save the worms in the winter. But that’s I do. And then in the spring used a horse manure fork to sift out clumps or shake the vermicompost so it’d be small
Particles. I can’t afford a big shaker.
Oh anyways i heard from a video fungal dominated tea doesn’t work like bacteria dominated tea. In bacteria compost tea the bacteria literally can grow in the air rated water and ya add unsulfured molasses. But fungal dominated tea doesn’t let fungal actually grow like bacteria cause fungal doesn’t grow in water but roots of plants. I suppose using fungal dominated compost to make a tea lets you spread the fungal stuff onto plants but the fungal or fungi won’t grow in water like bacteria. So you might be better off adding the fungal compost tk the roots as you plant.
I tried a few mychorizal products a couple years ago before I had biochar. I probably should try that again.
Isn’t Hawaii going to be a sandy soil?
I have been learning and doing my own testing. I can also confirm the biochar does way way better than without
I have experimented with biochar for my bachelor thesis. Biochar without innoculation performed the worst, the other formula has no significant improvement but one recipe outperformed even chemical fertilizer. The most interesting part is I used fungal insecticide to innoculate the plant and plants with biochar responded the best to innoculation.
Awesome video as usual, i usually add wood ash around the base of plants in the Autumn, there are always bits of charcoal mixed in, not bio char, just normal charcoal, i was wondering if normal charcoal has any pro's or cons?
Normal charcoal is a bit different in the sense that’s it’s difficult to make a homogeneous mix. But very similar properties in a lot of cases. Keep in mind too much is possible with both and can result in some issues.
The bits of charcoal your adding around your tree's is what people call uncharged biochar, in this state it will act like a nutrient sponge and absorb surrounding nutrients for around 1 year until it is sufficiently charged up and full then it will be a slow release feeder of those nutrients.
The soils are probably more uniform because they are created by slash and burn, id be willing to bet that the charcoal isn’t dug in, it’s just the accumulation of thousands of years of slash and burn cycles on the same piece of land.
The milpa agriculture system is a fascinating method. They would clear and burn the area, then use it for annuals a few years while the trees and bushes regrow, they would select trees with useful traits and cull others. When the trees began casting too much shade, they would move onto the next piece of forest.
This is why there are so many arguments about the Amazon being a man made garden that was consciously created. Because in a way it was. Just not how we think. It’s the the product of a slow accumulation of humans living as part of the ecosystem. Not just some sudden digging in of metres of charcoal.
That is what I’m willing to bet, anyway.
Here here. I find it hard to believe otherwise or these sites are simply flood plains or something. I am of the understanding that there are sites that are manmade with pottery and whatnot in the mix but I would think this would just be a garbage pit that eventually it was figured out was fertile. The thought that they used huge kilns to make biochar and then evenly dug it in across the land just seems like an unneeded overengineered thought.
Do the research to see how they did it and no we can't re create it without being in that exact area where that soil and those bio char from plants growing at 6000 ft elevation and the the nematodes that in habit that land and so on and so forth. The environment as a whole including all human waste pottery or in physical form plus animal waste. Remember those canals were also home to all sorts of fish which helped form the sludge they still grow on today. I'd love to get my hands on the real soil
Phew, you did it again, you did it again. You have provided so much information to chat about! I have already cancelled 3 comments! Each one had a minimum of 5 paragraphs!
HAHAHAHA uh oh. That’s never a bad thing just hard in the fingers 😏😉
@@GardeningInCanada I should put my thoughts on paper first I guess
Hahaha
@@GardeningInCanada Terra preta has had many hundreds of years sitting, aging, conditioning, charging, being inoculated. Which are the three main aspects to "good biochar." We can't just make it then throw it into or on top of our soils to expect benefits.
Glacial erosion and the sediments and such that were produced is a fascinating subject. I may add that it may not be a linear progression or a cyclical one. But I think that the large bodies of water were produced in a violent manner. Such as a huge iceberg breaking off causing catastrophic damage.
I agree with the aging, conditioning, everything you mentioned it’s very very true
16:33 The Amazon soil they typically use the term ADE’s but they’re not the only dark earth soil found on our planet you can find them on just about every continent they’re even found in The plains with clay soil, thought to be created by indigenous tribes that once lived here. Different dark earths soils have different names. And then on top of that there are different soils that have very unique properties to them like Loess soil or even termite mounds have very unique properties that have been used by many indigenous cultures to create anthropogenic soils. I am not saying biochar is for everyone I’m just saying we found man-made soil‘s that contain biochar all over the world and it’s pretty fascinating.
Geology + gardening! My two favourite topics. I’d love a video on glacial tills if feel up for it :)
Thanks for the idea!
Hi, i live in south east British Columbia. My question is does a fine sand glacial rock soil that receives a good annual percippittation tend towards sufficient available minerals for plants, or not?
Thank You.
Yup! to much and they leach, not enough and they dont solubilize
I have to fall on the side of man made. When you consider the origin of the concept and ask who discovered the charcoal effect on better growth also what other benefit did the charcoal have in that time era. The possibilities as I imagine them are this... As large groups of people settled in permanent areas human waste became an issue (whether the medicine man discovered the link or just the stink was the issue) they were collecting the waste in clay jars to be dumped away from the living areas and some bright person discovered that charcoal when applied to stinking messes lessened the stink. So it became part of the practice for a time of the sanitation crews to add charcoal to the waste area. Now in the course of time others noticed the vigorous growth in and near these waste collection areas and decided to use this waste as a soil amendment in the crop areas. But this is of course all just a wild guess...However you have to remember that these people of this time were just as intelligent and inciteful about their local conditions as we are today, in different ways of course but the same mental capacity we have today. and they had a couple thousand years to both figure this out and make it work on a large scale.
ya that thinking way sounds good until you learn that monkeys do stuff like this also. (medicinal usage of plants as an example)
The soil structure of the summarians and their civilization are interesting - and the irrigation / shifting of the rivers
Terra Preta is not just char. It is also pottery sherds and nobody has yet examined the pottery component very well but its not even randomly mixed in but arranged in ways that seem deliberate and to my eye its purpose is to create an internal hydrocycle. 3 feet thickness isnt going to work without a moisture distribution/lifting system and the pottery provides this. Im creating some for my garden which is nonporous clay that makes any dig into a big bowl that holds moisture and creates anoxic rot. Im firing that clay and building an understructure of it; have high hopes for a deep living oxygenated soil i cant have without it.
I have seen videos of people using unglazed clay vessels for creating time delayed "self watering" systems in gardens and landscaping. I have wondered if the pottery fragments are remnants of some type of irrigation. I have also heard that Amazonian people smashed clay pottery as part of ceremonies. It's such a wonderful puzzle and treasure hunt.
Super video. Hoping to use inoculated/charged biochar in my silt/sand fields plus other organic matters. Been mulling over setting in +1meter plugs of a 'terra preta' blend .
That will be awesome!
I've seen at least one vendor equivocating biochar with terra preta, and I don't like it one bit.
Biochar is one element in a complex recipe for terra preta that we don't really understand, and it seems that ancestral knowledge has been lost.
With biochar it does have to be charged with water, nutrients and microbes in order to be useful. If you don't charge the biochar then it's likely to spend a lot of time soaking up nutrients from the soil before it eventually starts helping. I've read that it can take months or even years for that to start happening.
Even before you charge the biochar, there are questions about how to develop beneficial microbes in the compost or other medium, using bokashi or other fermentation, aerobic decomposition, burying boiled rice to develop the indigenous micro-organisms, or other methods.
I don't agree that the soil you have is just what it is, and that's the hand you've been dealt. If that were true, pretic anthrosol wouldn't exist as we understand it. We also wouldn't see examples like Ernst Gotsch in Brazil, Geoff Lawton in Jordan, and we wouldn't see the opposite - monocultures turning fertile land into barren dirt.
Land can be transformed by intelligent application of human intervention, through the use of plants, animals and microbes.
I do large container gardening. Will adding charcoal to my compost pile improve the soils in my containers?
Gardening in Canada could you do a video on geo-injectors (soil injectors here in the Americas). they have it over in the UK and often use biochar for injections. im wondering what your thoughts are on both the geo-injector idea as well as their use of biochar in those compacted soils.
Very interesting video, I am a new gardener who has been learning about soil over the past 3 years. This year, I burned 4 giant pits into biochar, and have laid them out on the soil with amendments to charge the char.
I have a garden plot near Guelph Ontario, and this former cattle farm land has horrible hard clay which bakes to a rock-like consistency under the summer sun, and traps the downpours for days and weeks at a time. I had hoped the char might help it, but heard you say that in a clay soil, it might result in killing all the plants. In a quick answer, could you tell me why that is? Thank-you for all the amazingly insightful videos!
Love learning about soil! Thanks for the info.
Glad you enjoy! Soil needs unite 🤓
Lol I think 🤔 you meant Soil Nerds Unite
Thank you. Interesting.
Glad you liked it!
I failed to hear definition what Terra Petra soil is in this video. Do soil scientists know ?
It’s highly debated. Soil scientist are split between mammals and naturally occurring. But they are not split between the benefits it provides to the natural soil in the area
10:04 wouldn't surprise me if it lasted long enough for the roots near the surface to actually carbonise from the heat tho i suspect if you actually got the soil that hot is would also sterlise it so maybe not
I have Terra preta potta soil. I convinced myself biochar was necessary in my fabric pots lol
Hahaha lots of air flow and good drainages so biochar doesn’t hurt
Yes farms are huge most of us need to go out and stand in the middle of a cornfield to grasp just how huge a volume of Preta would be required to change its composition overall.
Impossible to accomplish in less than generations
Ashley, if you have come up with a way to replicate the Terra Preta soils in the Amazonian Basin, we need to connect as I will be moving to southern Oregon to turn ranches for sale into food forests with permaculture, and we will need as much Terra Preta as we can come up with.
So what if I told you there was actually something similar that would probably do you better than trying to replicate the soil‘s of the Amazon, the thing is is when we tried you specifically fall of the Amazons recipe often times it’s doing more harm than help because it’s a completely different soil type. But over the years lots of natural farmers have come along and written books and those natural farmers have learned from other natural farmers and they’ve created something called career natural farming in these practices you can learn to have self resilience when it comes to agriculture and put the power back into the hands of the farmer you’ll be able to create things called indigenous micro organisms with five levels to it and the fourth level being a combination between regular old soil and all of the knowledge passed down from microbes to that soil the idea and concept of the Amazon terra preta soil to quite literally replicate itself can be done with Korean natural farming methods. I recommend looking into Chris Trump as he is the most trusted person to teach upon the subject he has a multitude of free videos there’s tons of information from peer reviewed studies like Cornell university the Institute of Hawaii I’ve read a few hundred papers on Google scholars and there are plenty more available options from the original creator is creating books that have been translated to English and much more.
Sorry if some of the words were auto corrected if it doesn’t make sense let me know and I’ll come back and fix it 😂🙃
The tera preta is pretty easy thing to do if you do as Mexicans do. Since I am in Oklahoma and have different ingredients do a little different spread about 10 inches of wood chips them enough truck loads of cedar brush of well dried wood. Have had 40 mph winds being drawn into it and temps 800 10 feet away. Where I learned from Mexicans and Navajo way a mat of sage with ether mesquite or cat pinon pine brush over depends on elevation
At the very end you said that adding Biochar to loamy soils was something to regret; can you elaborate? My theory (untested) is that Biochar must be inoculated to be of any real benefit.
I enjoyed the discussion. Thank you for that. I had a question considering the the root system in the Amazon. Is it likely that the root systems are at a depth of 3 meters prior to the fire and subsequently the bio char is 3+ meters due to burning at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen? It is logically assumed that old rainforests untouched could have that much diversity of growth over Eons.
I’m just trying to get a basic understanding. Thank you for your time.
Thanks for this.
Great video as always. Glacier videos please.
Haha love the nerd vibe
Another excellent video !! This is a fascinating topic and the applications seem beneficial. The studies I've heard about seem to have varying opinions on the benefits, especially in varied soil, it's texture and structure.
I realize this is a difficult question to answer but what would be the balloark cost of soil testing on a 5 acre piece of land ?
Great and thought provoking video ;)
Cheers Jason and Colleen 🌱🌱🌱
Depends on how many samples you take, rather than how much area you survey.
A soil sample is usually several pieces of soil from an area all combined, to represent the area, e.g. 5 holes 30m apart, and these are combined in a bag and that's your sample you send away to get tested. This accounts for patchiness in the soils, so you are not just over representing one type of soil.
If your soil is quite similar across the 5 acres you may be able to take just one sample, but more likely you could take 5 samples from across the property (each sample being from 5+ individual holes) to get an idea of the variation. You could pick different soil type to get an idea of the variation on the property, e.g. take sample from both the most fertile and less fertile spots, and the driest and wettest spots, and then you can see the likely range of variation present.
So the answer to your question is not something she can answer, you need to go to a lab that does soil analysis and find out how much they charge. You would need to know what you want to test for but there should be a standard test with a standard rate, and the cost to test your site is the number of samples you want tested times the cost of testing each sample.
@@thecurrentmoment wow, ok perfect. Thanks for the answer Dale. Makes a lot of sense !!
Cheers
@@clivesconundrumgarden glad I could help
are you using a grow light for youtube videos? :)
haha no a box light
What's your knowledge on soil in Missouri?
Thank you so much for your videos! Watching "Gardening in Canada" to get great info about fixing my Florida sandy soil is funny. I've watched a number of your videos and wanted some advice. I wanted to ensure I understood your advice on sandy soils. Would you recommend trying biochar and taking a more "No Dig" approach to gardening in sandy soil? What would you recommend as a good bed mix that I am trying to build? A 4-inch Top Soil with wood fines and 1-2 inches of manure compost? Or something way different?
I would skip the the wood and go with the top soil that has 1-2 inches of cured and aged manure compost. So a sandy soil you want to go no dig as much as possible. When you water make sure you are fertilizing as well.
@@GardeningInCanada biochar worth trying or just do the topsoil first?
I would start with top soil. It’s really going to come down to how sandy the soil really is.
@@dalemulert Another Floridian here. I'm in the panhandle zone 9a close to the beach. I have almost pure sand and get 60+ inches of rain per year. A year before I started my vegetable garden I piled up a 50/50 topsoil/compost mix a foot high with pine straw bales as a border to hold it all in place. One year later it was half the height. That's how fast the organic matter 'disappeared'. For a couple of years I added more compost every year but it was never enough. About 2 years ago in addition to compost I started adding small amounts of bentonite clay and charged biochar and it seems to be helping quite a bit.
@@DC-rd6oq Interesting, I did add some biochar to the beds when I made them this year with the topsoil and manure compost. It's free and easy for me to make the biochar, so I just went for it when I was building up the beds. How much clay are you adding ratio-wise? I agree it's amazing how fast the organic material disappears here. Thank you for your advice.
No one size fits all, The desert soils of the south of SW USA are devoid of organic matter, so any addition of organics, carbon add to the Cation Exchange.
I have great success of adding organics, charcoal, be it chips, hay, manure the Alluvial Fan that we live on now is a jungle, with not much watering, the monsoons now absorb as compared to running off, and earthworms are thriving.
How is the Amazon rainforest soil dead but be called the most biodiverse place on the plant that grows a luscious dense jungle at the same time?
Haha! That’s a really good question. It’s a very delicate systems that relies entirely on cycling on nutrients. If one component is missing the system collapses.
@@GardeningInCanada hmm. where does the cycling of nutrients come from? Dead animals and trees rotting on the ground putting nutrients back in? Nutrients from the rivers leeching into the soil banks
Glaciers do not move up mountains! They recede (melt) faster than they are forming.
pottery fragments in the soil , you forgot , the secret part it is.
At 9 minutes you say the forest becomes biochar. My understanding is charcoal isnt biochar until it's colonized and innocuoated with biology after a forest fire the biology of mycorrhizae will not come back on its own it spreads by contact only. I make biochar but don't consider it finished untill it's a complete soil food web inoculated with all the microorganisms. I never use charcoal on sandy soils I lived on the beach and a tablespoon clay per sq meter added to water is enough to retain water for days.
This is a good article describing the different between all the possible cases. From activated carbon, biochar to charcoal. Biochar is specifically made under pyrolysis
char-grow.com/biochar-vs-charcoal-vs-activated-carbon
enlighting, I am sad that terra petra soil(s) are all magical and likly not easily repeartable. I enjoy the facts and presentation, thank you. will subscribe.
I thought terra preta is a combination of charcoal, human waste and bones. It spreads over hundreds of years of biological horizontal movements.
Not from the studies I read. The majority were biochar and Amazon soils. Such as this one www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/terra-preta
17:01 I would have to disagree with your statement there are publishing‘s from the University of Hawaii and Cornell University showing how you can take Korean natural farming methods and essentially put that soils “DNA” onto a soil that is completely devoid of life and pass knowledge unto dirt, sand, etc. seeing is believing and practicing natural farming for the last three years I’ve quite literally watched soil go from dust to living soil using the process of IMO.
9:39 pyrocumulus
I think the soil was man-made I watched a video with a few native made it teepee like structure with logs and green matter and boulders on top of it set it on fire from inside and make biochar.
That’s very cool.
Why isn't this obvious? People found charcoal in the soil as a result of forest fires and that it worked well for them, so they replicated it manually.
Terra Preta seems to be an example man's understanding and imitation of natural process. The fact that the pockets of terra preta in the Amazon are amidst an actual food forest would be a large coincidence
I’m going to have to disagree with you. Biochar will act as vermiculite/perlite on clay soil
Im Brazilian… Terra preta is enough when saying, terra preta soil you are saying soil preta soil.
you said it right. Preta means pressed
Preta is Portuguese for black.
I disagree too, 2 years of regenerative farming and large scale have changed soil
💚💚
❤️❤️❤️
Biochar is alkaline so it raises the Ph of alkaline souls which isn't a good thing
good video but hard to understand your voice.
I’m getting chaotic in parts of my yard. After a decade of being scraped bare by a moron, I have outstanding geology but not a lot of biology in my dirt. I’m planting a huge variety of different plants in the soil. That’s how I get biology beneath the surface. Roots making exudates baby!
... Charcoal is wood that's burned in the absence of oxygen...
thats biochar
@@GardeningInCanada Charcoal burned in the presence of sufficient oxygen is ash.
Biochar and Charcoal differ in that Biochar is made at higher temperatures than Charcoal. Charcoal has a lot of resin left in it for additional burning a flavor profiles. Good Biochar has very little resin left.
When the question of the video isnt in the first 10 minutes you know its just a bunch of ramblings.
It's a bit sandy and a bunch of rocks
Terra Petra Soils LOL
How about Terra Preta?
Thanks for the science end of all this bio char trend. Sticking with compost and leaf mold though.
Terra Petra though...
Preta not petra. The latter is in Jordan. ;)
The Amazon will need reforestation, this knowledge might come in handy.
That’s true it would definitely help
I think tech. it would have been the Inca not the Mayans lol
pfft you are definitely right. I just read a thing on Mayans and how the deforested their area which messed up the cenota's and ultimately caused their demise.... not the best farmers
I figured out the secret of terra Preta many years ago. If op wants to know just respond
Nope al the terra preta is man made.