Improving the soil for generations - with soup cans!?
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Now this is a fun idea - and more useful than you might think!
We've been obsessed with making biochar for years, often making char in pits and open burns. We've also learned to make traditional charcoal, and have even used a Kon Tiki style biochar cone.
Yet recently we can across a video from @LiveOnWhatYouGrow sharing his method of making a biochar retort from two cans - for free! We had to give it a try. This is what we've discovered.
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![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
The wit, the low key sarcasm, the knowledge drops, the cultural memery.....infotainment at its finest.
aryan kid was right, needs more cowbell...🐮🔕
Agreed
Hear here!
What movie was he referencing or culturally mimicking? I would like to watch them.
@@koltoncrane3099 SNL skit w Christopher Walken
Thumbs up for recognizing the work of a smaller RUclips channel and sending viewers there, rather than just reproducing what he did. I'm going to go check his video out now!
👍❤🎉🙏
I trust this man. You can too. ...not so much because he knows what he's talking about... though he does that too... but rather because he wears a Good sport coat. The man who wears such a Good sport coat is trustworthy.
🤭😆😊❤
I was wondering when David will talk about Ancient and mysterious lost civilizations !
Ya I was like this guy is wearing a church coat. But you called it a sport coat. Haha it’s like ya he’s sophisticated. Probably what people wore a century ago even doing chores. I’ve seen some old photos black and white and it’s like they dressed up.
I had an English teacher in high school. No one ever wore a tie to school except maybe prom or if they had football players dress up.
But I had an English teacher that wore a bow tie everyday he taught. He made me smile haha. He dressed up with a bow tie and button up shirt. He had to quit cause he had some illness so he ended up working at the prison to teach cause there he only had to work three days so he could recover or have more time off at that job.
That English teacher also rode a unicycle in the Fourth of July parades. Haha first time I ever saw one super unique.
This video featured the greatest Corning dinner plate ever made.
Yep, l noticed that, too! They ask amazing prices on the internet....! 😳🤭
Mom used those for 30 years. Then decided she was sick of them. If only she knew to keep them.
We got those when we married and are still using them. Just celebrated our 55th anniversary!
Live On What You Grow
Is a great channel. Good you gave them a shout out.
David, I learned this technique years ago in Boy Scouts. We used old steel paint cans with the hammer on lids. We would load them with any old cotton fiber cloth we could find. Old blue jeans were the best. We did this to produce char cloth because it catches a spark from a flint and steel remarkably well. We all would bring our cans to our first spring camp out and everyone would set them in the fire. We would have char cloth for the whole summer! I have used this same technique to make a gallon of char for art purposes as well.
Ah yes - char cloth!
Around here, after the early corn crop they switch to cotton. About October when the cotton is picked afterwards there are bolls in the ditches and they form a second white line along the edge of the road. Any of that could be picked up. Watch occasional traffic, face traffic.
@@davidthegood a 55 gallon drum with a small hole punched in the top drum needs a lock ring removable lid
When compared to our ancestors, we are very lucky to have readily-available tools. Stores are full of anything you could need and with online shopping, you don’t even have to leave the house. The trouble comes when we must discern between a quality tool and a silly gadget. The best way I’ve found to do this is to look for a type of tool that has been around for a long time. The crucible of longevity proves a design.
Yes. Something that has been around for a long time, is likely to continue to be around. Taleb discusses this. Lindy Effect.
@@davidthegood thanks, I'll look more into that. Having multiple purpose adds more upcycle value.
I will definitely be on the chat with you guys, I wouldn't miss it for anything!
Very much like what my neighbors built but he made his with the large barrels. He's been hooked on making it ever since he built his contraption. His raised beds are making some seriously nice produce. I finally got him into making his own fish emulsion and now he's gonna charge his char with it once it's done. His original charge method was running his pond water through it with a pump. That appears to work pretty well too. I generally use urine myself on the off chance it have char around from fires etc. I'll try to build one of these small ones eventually. Always hard to get the necessary fertilizer to grow the amount we do.
Our oldest pecan trees (80+ years old) all had tin cans & old strips of metal buried about 20 ft out from the trunk of each tree. Blessings from NW Florida!
peCAN trees
PeckON trees, peeCAN is something you find in a semi truck, full of lemonade you don't want
@@1millionpumpkins542lol it’s a Native American word and isn’t pronounced like can Pih-KAN. If you’re going to try and correct someone at least be correct
@Just_A_Name14 I wasn't "correcting someone", I was making a pun based on the tin cans buried around the pecan tree. Derp.
@@My1Appy ruclips.net/video/-DcA0p8Tvnk/видео.htmlsi=rcJDnbkz8P5UFvz-
When the professor has tweed on I take notes. ; )
And the spitcurl😊
@@debrabeghtol4332like Superman!!!
I didn't know about the curl until Rachel told me most of the way through the video. "I thought you did it on purpose!" she said...@@debrabeghtol4332
He's drippin'
Several years ago I made one of these out of a paint can to show my grandson, on our family camping trip, how to make charcoal and also collect the pine tar that comes out under the bottom hole of the can. the small top hole released the wood gas. I still have that paint can and never made to connection with bio char. Gonna dig it out of the camping gear and try it this weekend. TYVM David
Much gratitude David, I been binge watching the videos. This method is so doable for me. I've known the value of biochar but was overwhelmed at the processes as I'm 62. So very excited, going to get my new home, new garden off to a good start.
Been using two tin cans for a couple months now and absolutely loving it. Avocado pipes and bits of bone come out the best imo. The man is not lying, you really can put anything in them. But like literally anything.
@Ni-dk7niNothing good comes from that, far too toxic.
David I've got a FEVER. And the only prescription is MORE BIOCHAR! Seriously this method is a game changer for many. For the beneficials I'm thinking take the DFSW, add some worm castings, compost and a little molasses and aerate for a few days it so the char soaks in a brewing compost tea.
Nice, this is how artists who make their own charcoal for drawing do it :) Also EdibleAcres made a video that someone might find useful: Biochar - Making it in the wood stove AND heating our home.
Great Job...
Makin Biochar on the down low.
For artists, they cna get willow twigs of pine twigs and make really nice charcoal for drawing that way too.
My daughter and I made some drawing charcoal out of grape vine prunings. I will try willow - thank you.
Just watching Shawn James interview Huw Richards and they mentioned your name. You're really starting to get noticed by some big names. You've earned it! I knew you'd end up changing the gardening world.
That was nice of them.
Biochar and cowbells. Perfect combo.
Bushcrafters do this on a smaller scale to make char cloth, for use with flint and steel fire making.
I am beginning to like your humor David 🙂 This was an excellent little machine. cha cha cha charged 🙂
Thank you, my friend.
My grandma had those corelle dishes with green flowers 🥺 oh how I miss her!!!
She loved to garden, I would loved to have her with me on this new journey I’m starting with gardening.
All u "Good" folk crack us up! Keep it coming..plz! Can i add a additional tip? I burn the cans empty first, to burn off that inside coating. Then soapy water scrub out. Jus to be safe. Not sure if the coating is toxic after the burn & maybe ruins the nice char. Thanx for most excellent work on video by all!
Yes, l thought that, too. There is always a liner coating. I would want a paint can to be Very Clean, too! 🥫
Yes, that's a good tip
Esp when you are not sure what contents were in the cans .V practical, thank you 😮❤.
Excellent, thankyou. I shall pop across to the other chappy shortly, but your explanation is already quite clear. And thankyou for doing the right thing by him, too, where credit is due. God bless. 🙂👍
His video gave us many hours of entertainment - I am happy to share the fun.
I constantly amaze and annoy my husband. I did not explain what I was doing as I went and gathered two big cans, banged them together, popped a hole in one of them, then filled a 5 gallon bucket of wood chips to sit next to our wood stove. THEN, put this double can looking thing in the wood stove and cooked it. He was so baffled at what I was doing. But guess what? It worked. I have a small amount of biochar, but now if I just keep a batch going at the end of the day, and let it burn over night, I'll eventually have a pretty good supply of bio char. Ta Dah!!! Amazing indeed.
thank you Professor Good, always a pleasure attending your lectures.
We used this method to make char cloth for starting fires with flint and steel.
We have that EXACT SAME PLATE!!
I've been eating off one of those Corelleware beauties for about half a century!
Corelle family here too! "Stole" this pattern from MIL when we moved out, grabbed the identical blue pattern from goodwill and finally "grew up" and bought a brand new set. Like everyone else I know we now have a mix of various patterns 😂
Replacing the triangle with a mini retort is THEE best amendment of all. So appreciative of the Good Gardeners. Education with a smile.
Give thanks!
What could turn out to be more important then improving the soil is purifying drinking water! Doing the process described in this video so you have carbon on hand to filter rainwater (nowadays thanks to geoengineering, weather manipulation/cloud seeding etc rainwater is loaded with barium, cesium, strontium and aluminum for starters) is a great way to eliminate at least the organic chemicals. Charcoal is one of the go-to materials used in the water filtration industry for filtering out chlorine and other chemicals they add to municipal water.
Thanks for dressing up for us.
thank you for your shout out to Live on What You Grow for the retort construction. Way too many RUclipsrs try to profit from videos they watch but never credit. I'm here because someone over there referenced your channel and I subscribed because of your honesty and integrity. I look forward to learning more from you.
Thank you. It is good to give credit.
David the soil wizard.
@EdibleAcres has a video called "MAXimize your wood heat - Low/no cost tips for much more warmth" where he shows his method of this using a steam table tray and lid in his wood stove.
Classic.
Favorite video ever!!!!! You are my #1 source for biochar how-to, but the entertainment value of this one is unmatched. Soooooo appreciate how much “good” info you provide bookended with the SNL skits. Best combo ever 🏆
Awesome video 👍
That little star wars 'but how?' intro had me laughing 🤣
Thank you! My garden needs some help, and I have a Sweetgum tree. I also like the liquid fertilizer idea from your daughter.😊
Apart from the content which is awesome as usual, the style of the video is just chief's kiss
You're a good man, David!
Slick backed hair and tweed jacket. You look like a southern baptist pastor preaching about....biochar. good job!
Yea a little more bio char ....1
2
3
😂
You mentioned all the questions I have to avoid hit and miss. I thank you for that. God bless............
❤❤❤😂😂😂very informative and extremely entertaining!
Thank you
"I have 10 minutes free before we leave for church. I think I will go into the garden and play with some fetid swamp water, some biochar, and the filthy container I made it in..." 😀
This is the way......for small homes & gardens.
kudos to you for sharing the info about the youtube channel that first showed how to make one of these mini retorts. I saw his video about a year ago and was amazed by how easy it can be to make high quality char.
I'm truly sorry to hear it took so long for you to make one of these. I wish I saw this video earlier! I live in MN and burn a wood stove for heat, i could have made a lot with these... I always try to keep and pick out good charcoal pieces but it's not easy when everything is burning.
Buddy, I've got to hand it do you. When I watched your multi bed test, I honestly thought you were trying to grow in an old gravel parking lot. Your soil looked exactly like some of our back dirt roads here in Alberta. You've done some amazing things. Well done sir.
Thank you
that was a great riff on the cowbell skit
Thanks!
Thank you, Tony - good to see you!
Awesome I love it
I thought you were gonna say Cow Bell 😂😂
Great info, David!
Love the intro. I bet your kids don't even know what they are re-enacting, that's pretty funny. Also the best cinematography in permaculture!
Your videos are informative and hilarious!❤
Here's the thing, I've watched all your biochar videos and none of them were really an option for my small urban backyard. This method however changed that! I had the whole family in the yard helping. My wife was collecting sticks, our dogs were chomping them down and I stuffed em in the can. I have been making a can or two after work everyday!
Thank you.
Thank you for this video, I've wanted to make biochar for years and now I can. Also thank you for linking us up with Live on What You Grow.
I did this on a smaller scale with a couple soup cans, a duct crimper, a tabletop smokeless fire pit, and a few handfuls of hardwood pellets. Makes perfect bone char in about 2 hours. I plan to scale this concept up to a larger smokeless fire pit and two #10 tomato cans that my favorite local Italian restaurant donated to me. With both being so portable, I might just take it camping and biochar the previous night's food scraps instead of tossing them in the garbage like I usually do. The cool thing about smokeless fire pits is that the wood pellets themselves get turned into pure carbon as well with next to no ash. It's practically a carbon factory!
That was hilarious. Love the jam 🔔🥁🎸🎤
I also love where your heads at, I also immediately thought of stuffing it full of weird stuff. My short list included acorns, black walnut and coffee beans.
I learned the hard way about cow manure. I put a lot on my garden last year and it resulted in multiple new varieties of weeds.
Dave, thanks for making this video in your Sunday best.👍
Yessir, its burn season! A week in..making charcoal along the way. Did I hear "in" or "on" fireplace? I did that few winters ago, for about a week. Creosote buildup, bad, I'll nvr do again. Outside..I use 5 gallon vintage metal can inside wash machine steel liner, (the circular thing full of holes). Heading out for nice moonlit burn now, cheers!
I used to do this trick with creating biochar for Firestarter for camping out of a Altoid can. I've been using charcoals in my terrariums for years. last year when I was cleaning my garage, I found my charcoal bags with tiny bit left so I discarded it in my strawberry bed. When the next season came around, it did the best in the past 7 years.
One of the most Goodest ever!! Thank you for filling in gaps I had from the original gentleman's post. More biochar!
Looking fleek, David 👍
Amazing!! Awesome idea!! Thankyou.I cant wait2 try! Its $12for a small bag of charcoal last time I looked..
I watched the Live On What you Grow video last night, and it was great. It is great that you didn't take away buy added to that video. Great content.
Very cool. I've used store bought all natural lump charcoal before.
Buy it, bust it up, run it through a garden shredder and you have nice fine char you can then charged.
Making your own is more fun plus who doesnt have garden waste
I like this for small scale biochar production. Instead of methane polluting the air in composting or an inefficient fire, you add some CO2 to the air which is more benign and make your fireplace more efficient for a time.. For tree trimmers and other owners of industrial amounts of organic material who currently burn, a methane generator powered by solar kiln-style drying, with added Brown's gas from electrolysis - also from solar/wind/battery would produce emission free biochar. Cities have large amounts of nitrogen products to "charge" the biochar. Present technology is sufficient for a vast improvemnt for gardeners and farmers benefitting society and the environment.
TY Sir, Fam, All❤❤❤
Hi David. I watched the referenced video months ago and ever since, I keep #10 cans loaded for when I do my regular burn barrel fires. Or, whenever I do large brush fires. An absolutely ingenious method which produces a great product. Like you, I had to purchase the tool from amazon. That was the hardest part - waiting two days for the tool because I was so excited. I admire your nobility. Thank you!
I have been doing exactly this for many years. Paint cans come with a tightly fitting lid, you just need to puncture the bottom to let the fumes exit.
Can the paint cans be reused or is it a one time deal?
@@bevdixon9615
They can be reused quite a few times, but they don't last forever.
Here in the shoulder season of wood heating, stuffing the firebox and shutting off the air also provides an ash bucket worth of charcoal.
This is THE SOLUTION I was after since months. For our cat litter we use wood pellets, as they are a byproduct and biodegradable, thus ecologically sensible. I only used them - the soiled ones - under non-food trees and hedges so far, as I have only small-scale composts that will not heat up and destroy any potentially harmful microorganisms. There HAD to be something more useful. And this is it. Thank you!!!!!
❤❤❤ready for this chat!
Love it! My fetid swamp water is about 5 months old, too.
Tacos! Yeah! Mine has raw fish filets, and I thought winter would be the best time for that😅
you can do the same thing by aging arborist wood chips. after 3yrs, the wood chips hold moisture and nutrients very well. i do bio-char too but i had to totally change my very poor coarse sand soil of my 1 acre orchard/garden/food forest. when you need huge amount of soil building material, it is easier to age mountains of wood chips for a few years then spread it all over. i rarely have to water my fruit trees even on hot summers with no rain for over 4 months. meanwhile, i made charcoal in pits from branches and mixed them with the aged wood chips. this method also increases mycelial activity and a lot of life which further improve the soil. i like the small reactor though. i have to make one since i heat with wood and have branches i can convert to char all winter. neat idea 🙂
Cool! Just my size. Thanks ❤
Thank you sir, great help that you enumerated stuff to char like banana trunk
Thanks for highlighting love on what you grow, he puts out interesting content that has helped me a lot 🌸
I'm making biochar as per your video as we speak!!!
Great video! Thank you 😎👍
I saw the video on the 'live on what you grow' channel. I was completely blown away too. I'm planning on making them from larger vegetable oil cans that restaurants and takeaways use.
Oh thanks!! Exciting use for pine cones, wood shavings and bark, yay!
Love it ;-)….all of it
….hoarders Sadly can relate ❤ 🙂
It was dark ….lol
Socks
I plan to try this….thank you!!!
Liked the flame 🔥
I just watched the video over this weekend and was favorable impressed and it seemed logical so I bought the tool and am now collecting cans to make biochar. I was really glad to see you confirm what he said.
YAY! Your back!!!
Great way to convert your grass clippings into a soil amendment, mulch, filter media or for sequestration of some of that year's photosynthesized CO2.
I love it! We need more cowbells🔔 (IYKYK)
That was awesome, David. Oh my goodness....the cowbell (excuse me the biochar) will never die!!
I love it! David the Good manhandling charcoal (biochar) in his Sunday suit! Eying my #10 cans and looking for those with real metal sides t o experiment on.
I used this method on acorns and also old grain and put it around the bushes of our home.
Have been adding biochar to the lawn as well so that way, if need be, the front yard can be converted into a big garden if things ever got that bad.
Great video, I really enjoyed watching it.
Thank you, my friend.
Okay that’s one I haven’t heard before 😅
Impressive. Thank you for taking the time to teach/share.
thats hvac tools! Home steading is my dream... once i retire from hvac and dont have to worry about making a profit,
Thank you!
I use a stove pipe with a cap that slides off. I fill it up with my materials, like walnut shells, twigs, etc. Throw it in my outside fire pit when burning brush.