Compost tea bubblers are too much for me, so I went with bananas and worms. :) Visit www.wellgroundedgardens.com for more product descriptions. email-us@wellgroundedgardens.com for more information.
Suggestion for next time. Remove the glossy sticker on the banana skin. Add the skin too. The nutritious potassium is concentrated in the skin. Have no problem with your solution. It is your solution and it worked. If it works - you don't need to fix it. You can add to it though. Mine is even more lazier and naturally takes more time. I just roughly crushed biochar and piled them up in the soil. Added kitchen waste, tree leaves, some soil and mixed with a shovel once a week. Watered with diluted urine. Let the rain on it. I know 70% biochar totally suppresses pathogenic viruses and parasites but will never add any excretion - dog, cat or human anytime. Herbivore excretions - yes. Just cow dung for now. One time found fungi growing on it. Added azomite, coffee grounds, grated coconut wastes etc. Mixed it in. Found papaya seeds sprouting from kitchen wastes. It has a lot of millipedes on it. If magnified - has a lot of arthropods. I have not tried growing anything on it. I suspect my sister has been stealing some for her plants. I see biochar on her pots.
Nice! We do use the peels (stickers removed) which I should’ve mentioned-I put them in our regular compost pile to get some potassium back into the soil. I’ve got a chicken compost run planned at our new place and if we get that stood up, I plan to just put the biochar chunks into those compost input materials and let the chickens work it in for me. Sounds like your sister knows a good thing when she sees it 😉.
Why remove the sticker? I believe the government has strict regulations on the stickers being edible and also any ink used in newspaper and add print biodegradable.
Nice!!! I had to search to find it, here, but it was totally worth the effort. This year is my first season using the castings with the biochar and the transplants are loving it.
You did a very good job with the char! Next use the whole banana with the peel. My questions: How are your plants doing now? How deep into the soil have you placed the biochar? The deeper the bettter (5' to 8' best), what percentage of biochar to soil? I keep hearing 10% to 15% by volume is the best ratio. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks! We usually save the banana peels and put them in our regular compost but you’re right, I could definitely grind them up. I am only producing small amounts of biochar with this system and it only goes in the worm bin; then my seed starting mixture (soil blocks + “potting up” mixture into grow bags) is 50% those worm castings and 50% coconut coir. When my transplants go into the garden they don’t get any additional biochar. So as an overall % of the soil it’s super low. 😕 I am developing a larger garden at our new house with a chicken compost run (if the township gives me a zoning variance) and will hopefully get more biochar running through that system.
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Since watching this video have started to blend at every feeding in same vermihut. Have a similar blender, put one piece of same charcoal with fruits/vegetables and water. Noticed a faster break down of all food scraps (3 days) after feeding each tray one container full feel like population is healthier w char added.
Great video , I found a good way to crush the charcoal. I took an old pair of jeans and tied the bottom legs. I drive over and over like you do but the jeans are great and don’t bust . 😎🇺🇸😎
I think you made a bit too much work for yourself. Save your blender. Do what you did with the car lol, then with the larger chunks still left over just crush with a hammer or mortar & pestle, then add the powder directly to your feed bin, mix it in. It will work as a grit and will become biochar. Adding as a dry component will balance out your moisture in the bin a lot more and clean up any smells better. You can also add it to your finished casting trays if you are not going to harvest any time soon, add dry powdered charcoal, mix it in, then add a touch of water. The microbial life will end up housing themselves in the charcoal. Oh, if you want even less work, just crush charcoal into small pieces, does not have to be powder, add to feeding tray. Done. By the time you harvest, it will be biochar.
Totally possible. I just hate the charcoal dust and didn’t want to deal with the hammer/pestle phase; I’d rather let the blender do the work. I’ve found with the worm bin that large chunks of anything really don’t get “worked” by the worms-even food pieces-so I’m not optimistic about large biochar chunks getting broken up in the bin. Maybe my particular worms are just lazy. 😂 I will have chickens next year and I for SURE expect them to break up large biochar chunks for me, as part of our “composting run.” Really looking forward to that!
Worth trying, but, wouldn't it be better if you kept it in different sized chunks? All of your close plants could share the same pieces & the goodies with eachother. I know you left some but most was powder. I skipped past a video with the headline "'never crush biochar" or something similar. Might have been a Ted X talk. Makes sense to me.
Oh, interesting. My goal was to get it as fine as possible because I wanted the worms to be able to consume it in the worm bin. My next version of this will be with chickens (adding it in with compost inputs for them to “work”) and I’ll leave bigger chunks for that version.
Really appreciate the distinction between non inoculated "char" and actual inoculated biochar. Everyone falsely calls char "biochar" Secondly one of the main purposes of using char is to have small pieces large enough to hold microbial life and water 💧 If it is ground into dust l think that would defeat both those purposes. I think your idea is worth experimenting bit a side by side long term analysis will tell best overall techniques.
Thanks! I do think people underestimate the importance of inoculating their char into biochar. Next year I will hopefully have a chicken coop, and will add the char straight into their “compost run” to have them further break it down for me (while adding copious amounts of nitrogen).
WellGroundedGardens I add my crushed charcoal to my compost bin. I also add my chicken manure with the food scraps and. Yard waste. Charges my biochar without all the hassle once its all composted. I do have a stacked worm farm but I've heard powdered biochar is not as effective as the small chunks. Have you compared the 2 yet?
I can relate to needing the nap. 😂 It’s “lazy” in the sense that it isn’t a two-day process of bubbling the castings and the bio char together in a 5 gallon bucket, but yeah it’s not a short process in the absolute sense. At least it was fun to drive over it with my car 🤷♀️
You would generally get ash as opposed to char; ash doesn’t have much carbon in it (it has burned away) but does have mineral content and can raise soil pH. Char is almost pure carbon and doesn’t affect pH; it’s main use is to increase soil carbon and stabilize life in the soil-it acts like a hotel for helpful organisms, if you inoculate it with the good stuff before adding it to the soil.
Probably an issue with my baseline...I keep seeing people making biochar and then suspending it in compost tea with an aerator, etc. I could never quite get motivated to try that. So I am definitely not comparing to an easy alternative. ;)
@@WellGroundedGardens yeah I did alot of reading and came across an article saying compost is the best way to charge it. So I put some in my worm bin and I made a small (about a yard) compost pile with 5 different inputs (cow, horse and chicken manures, alfalfa pellets and hardwood fuel pellets) and then mixed it 1 to 1 with biochar and some fish fert for good measure... I'll let it sit for 14 days and then add to the veggie garden. Curious to see how the two methods work
I’ve got big plans for a chicken compost run after we move; I plan to put the biochar into that run to inoculate it. Let the chickens turn things for me. But for now, my HOA precludes that...
You could have saved your blender if you would have just blended the bananas with a little water and just stirred the bananas with the char and then added it to the worms.
Even powdered, the pieces are more than large enough to house the microbial life-you grind it up to increase surface area and speed up the inoculation process.
@@saddammall3337 The worms’ gut has a wide variety of bacteria that are very beneficial for the soil. That’s why worm castings are so good for the soil. .
Yup. @saddammall3337 that’s why I wanted them to ingest them-not consume or eat them per se but I wanted the pieces to pass through their digestive tracts to be inoculated with all the good stuff (aka, bacteria). Worms do the same thing with soil-ingest, not consume.
Sorry but thats not biocahar. It will add nutrients to the soil but it can change ph if its pulverised to dust. You want chunks of biochar, thats the point. A place to absorb nutrients and microbes. Also, worms wont eat it but you would've got castings mixed in from worms so its the same as the compost tea method, just way harder basically.
I’d always seen suggested optimum particle sizes of around 1/2-2mm-since the ratio of surface area to volume is important, to aid colonization. Can you point me to some research sources for the logic on larger pieces?
