Another website with a worrying comment
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,64871,00.html
Day, along with researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Georgia Institute of Technology, is developing technology based on the carbon-rich Terra Preta concept that uses charcoal to absorb greenhouse gases at facilities that burn fossil fuels. The charcoal is then mixed with other nutrients to create a super fertilizer, according to Day.
Day said that to create the charcoal that could be used as fertilizer, the biomass must be burned at temperatures somewhat lower than usual (say, 250 to 300 degrees Celsius).
"It's not the stuff you use in your barbecue," he said, noting that microbes in the nutrients bind the carbon to the mixture, preventing it from being released into the air or leeched into the ground for up to 5,000 years.
The charcoal fertilizer could be used to restore the nutrients in areas around the globe where soil has been depleted, according to Day. He believes charcoal-enhanced soil could increase crop yields by 200 percent to 300 percent.
Eprida has performed a demonstration of the scrubbing process, and Day said the next step is to develop a biomass processing plant adjacent to a coal power plant to test the technology on a large scale.
But Galen Suppes, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said he has "low regard" for technologies that claim to reduce greenhouse gases by turning them into solids.
"I don't believe that the product you are turning into carbon is going to stay in the ground. Five years down the line, it's back in the atmosphere," he said. "In a lot of this technology you are just playing games with the carbon.... Sometimes it breaks down very quickly, and sometimes not."
Johannes Lehmann, assistant professor in the Department of Soil Fertility Management and Soil Biogeochemistry at Cornell University, however, said the carbon has been retained in the soil at the Terra Preta sites in South America for up to 3,000 years.
I was concerned about this comment-
"Day said that to create the charcoal that could be used as fertilizer, the biomass must be burned at temperatures somewhat lower than usual (say, 250 to 300 degrees Celsius)"
So what is a home gardener to do?
When is charchol not charchol?
Today I spent a futile hour tring to buy charchol to mix into my potting mix.
One nursery had a kilo or so for $7
Another had activated chjarcol for fish tanks - imported from Japan -for abou$10 for 500grams
I had purchased a largish 5K? bag of BBQ charchol from the local supermarket, crushed this up and used it (about $7). Now they no longer stock it (It was imported from Malaysia)
Where my efforts in vain given the above comment?
Any thoughts?
On microrganisms I have found an Australian source of a Japanese mix;
but was very intersted in this marijuana web site which had a nice long discussion on brewing your own microbrial tea
SEE:
http://www.marijuana.com/Bible.php?loc=30&id=23
That link does't seem to get me to the page (I have printed-although google gives the same address? help?)
Basically the author recommended a "beginners' recipe for making a compost tea
20% sugar
10% yeast extract
10% kelp meal
compost
+
oxygen
Leave in a vat for acouple of weeks and it will grow into a nice tea"
Re: Terra Preta Soils-Making your own?
Re: Terra Preta
semantics is not always just pedantic quibbling. ~ douglas r. hofstadter
