Biochar is essentially charcoal, but not like the charcoal you buy. It is an age-old method of increasing soil health, it has been around for thousands of years.
Our biochar burners are made from stainless steel with an easy access clamp -stainless steel can withstand very high temperatures. Comes with a tool to hook the biochar burner out of the fire. They are designed to go in your fireplace or into a drum where you may be lighting a fire for heat. The benefits of this is the multi-use of the energy from the fire. Simply place your biomass into our biochar burner and then place the whole burner into the fire, and let the fire do its thing through a process called pyrolysis.
Biochar can be made from any biomass such as wood chips or twigs, bones, dried manure, paper, sawdust, nut shells etc. Biochar is produced through pyrolosis – which is the burning of wood in an oxygen limited environment so that the liquids and gases are released during pyrolosis and then leave mostly carbon behind. This remaining carbon is what we call biochar.
Biochar is great for improving soil structure, it is extremely porous, it is like a sponge and has a large surface area making it a great home for beneficial microbes to thrive and multiply. The surface area is so large that 1gram of biochar can have roughly 25metres of surface area! Because of its large surface area it can attract and hold nutrients and water and prevent them leaching from the soil, meaning in time less watering and fertilising.
Biochar remains in the soil intact for hundreds of years, so can permanently change a soil’s structure, improving aeration of compacted soils or increasing the water-holding capacity of sandy soils! Biochar has a negatively charged surface area which is able to bind to positively charged ions, there are many benefits of this including; helping to raise the pH of the soil, binding of nutrients that otherwise might leach from the soil (e.g. nitrogen, potassium, calcium - all of which are positively charged and so bind to biochar), and also biochar is able to bind to heavy metals potentially found in urban soils preventing the plant and soil taking these metals on.
Biochar needs to be inoculated or charged, so that it can start its work straight away. This can be charged through soaking it in compost tea or peeing in it (yes you read right) it can then be added straight to the soil or into your compost.
And because biochar is carbon-negative, it is able to capture and store Co2 - what a great way to do our part for climate change by helping to store carbon in the soil!
100mm wide x 280mm length
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We are a small, family run business with a purpose. We are here to help rid the world of unnecessary waste by providing you with beautiful, useful, lasting, and easy alternatives for your home. That is our dream. This is why we are here. We want to make conservation convenient.