Biochar
thetradition
10 years ago
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10 years agolaura1
10 years agoRelated Discussions
Biochar and mycorrhizal fungi for house plants
Comments (8)I add this to all of my plants. Well, almost all of them. Everything except for my orchids and other epiphytes that don't grow in ordinary soil. I like to use Jobe's Organics Fast Start. It adds many beneficial microbes to the soil, bacterial & fungal. In all the years that I've been doing this, I've never encountered any problems. In fact, quite the opposite. All of my plants do really well. You probably already know this, but I'd thought that I'd share this excerpt about this symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi: "Mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with plants at the root level. These fungi enshroud and, in some case, penetrate the structure of plant roots to form an intimate connection that facilitates a 2-way nutrient exchange. The mycelium of mycorrhizal fungi essentially extend the root system of their associated plants to help the plants easily draw in nutrients, minerals, and water from afar. In return, the mycorrhizal plant provides the fungus with photosynthesized sugars. The oldest plant fossils have been found with this association and it has been theorized that this relationship is what enabled plants to first come out of the oceans and onto land nearly 500 million years ago. Today, nearly all plants still form mycorrhizal associations. The few plants that do not are considered divergent weeds that have developed alternative strategies of survival. Most all cultivated plants perform much better when associated with mycorrhizal fungi and some plants require such associations to grow at all. Thus, it is highly recommended to learn to grow mycorrhizal fungi to improve soil fertility and increase plant health and productivity." Fertilizing our potted plants doesn't replace this relationship. The mycorrhizal fungi don't fertilize plants, they merely help the plants better absorb those nutrients from the soil. And in return, the plants give the fungi the sugars that they create thru photosynthesis. I mentioned earlier that I don't use them on my epiphytes, but that's not because orchids don't form symbiotic relationships with fungi. It's just that they rely on a different form of beneficial fungi. In fact, out in the rainforests, orchid seed germination would not be able to take place without the aid of these orchid mycorrhizae. Orchid seeds have no energy reserves of their own. They need the fungi to "infect" them and provide them the energy they need in order to germinate. For the longest time, orchid growers couldn't get their orchid seeds to grow. They would just spread them around the roots of the mother plants and hope for the best. This is why growing orchids was originally so expensive; because they could only be collected from the wild, or divided up as they got bigger. It wasn't until this symbiotic relationship was discovered that people were finally able to breed their orchids. After this discovery, everybody was able to cultivate these plants; creating literally hundreds of thousands of hybrids in the process....See MoreBiochar finds a new use!
Comments (0)Outside the tropics, the benefits are sketchy if non-existent, but ... Biochar shows benefits as manure lagoon cover. https://www.agronomy.org/science-news/biochar-shows-benefits-manure-lagoon-cover...See MoreSoil amendment with no NPK? "Biochar?"
Comments (4)I have used biochar. It is essentially wood that has been burned slowly with minimal oxygen, so instead of producing gray ash (which is mostly calcium carbonate, potash and potassium), it burns to black, dense, carbon-heavy charcoal. There is a similarity here to the product produced at the end of the composting process - humus. Both humus and biochar are almost all carbon. In biochar the other elements have been released into the atmosphere during burning, and with humus they have been consumed by bacteria and fungus over the course of many years. And they both look similar - black and granular, like used coffee grounds. They also both have the same function in the soil - the carbon holds on to nutrients and prevents them from washing down in to the water table, and in this way makes them available to the roots of plants near the surface. The don't add NPK and trace elements themselves, but they are a critical component of topsoil that allows plants to flourish. Humus takes many years to form. What we normally call "compost" is material that has been broken down by bacteria, but fungi are still working on consuming the woodier portions of the plants. While bacteria work fast - their part of the process takes a year or so or even just months if you can get it hot enough - fungi cannot be hurried. Depending on how woody the original material was, they could take 10 years to completely turn leaves and sticks into moist black humus. This is where biochar has an advantage. Rather than wait a decade for completely decomposed organic matter, you can burn wood either in the ground or in special ovens deprived of oxygen, and produce biochar in a matter of weeks. But, you pay for speed - biochar is relatively expensive, while every tree that falls in the forest turns in to humus for free - eventually. But, to finish here, let's back up to the bigger picture. You lost your topsoil, so what you want to do is essentially recreate it. Biochar will help, but if we are talking about a whole pasture, that is an expensive proposition. An alternative that will take longer, but be much less expensive would be to get chipped wood mulch from tree trimming services for free and spread that on the pasture with some N fertilizer to speed up the bacterial decomposition process. That will eventually produce humus in the natural course of things and should be broken down enough to plant grasses next year....See MoreAmending soil with biochar
Comments (6)@klem1, what specific advantages of biochar are you hoping to get over other soil amendments? What problems are you trying to solve? I think the short-cut answer is mostly that msot of the perceived benefits of biochar can be achieved with hugel or other organic amendments - particularly moderating soil ph, improved nutrient profiles, etc. Personally the only large-scale credible claims I've heard to my ear are longevity (if properly done, in a C-form that not many organisms eat). And here we're talking in some circumstances (not much air), and timeframes well beyond your lifetime. To me the rest of the claims are either handwaving / semi-magical, or very specific circumstances (really bad soil in amazon, and on that - note that mostly the terra preta was in middens - trash/sewer heaps - where other additions may have been more important). I'm being a bit dismissive because I take the general view - if you have organic material, use that directly or compsot it, and burning to char is polluting, dirty, a waste of energy that microbes would get, and well, that's enough. If you ahve some biochar about, sure, toss it in. But to manufacture it in your backyard for an uncertain benefit seems really burnt logic to me....See Morejane__ny
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