Okay, we're dodgin' rainstorms here.
And Sandra has a question, "In Q and A 19,
"you mention the chimney for bone char,
"but say that's a story for another time.
"How about now?
"I'd like to know more about bone char
"and how to make it and use it."
Okay.
Well I'm back in the same position here.
And this our chimney,
that we use to make the final stage of bone char,
it's a pretty solid piece of steel, so it doesn't burn out.
It's got three legs on the bottom.
So we can position it well,
in fact we can stab it into the ground like that.
And this heavy chimney stands up.
But first off, we collect our bones.
Dry out the bone.
And when we've got a big pile of dried bones,
we make a good fire, get some real red hot embers goin'.
And we put the bones into the fire, and we burn the bone.
Once we burn the bone, and it goes really dry and brittle.
And when it's ashed right down,
we get the bone and we powder it.
We smash it right up.
As much as we can.
Even if it's little splinters,
but we powder it up as fine as we can,
then we make another fire.
And we get it red-hot again.
And we put the powdered bone into it.
And then we red-hot embers,
and we stand this into the fire,
so there's your bone,
red embers with the powdered bone put into it
after one burn.
We stab that into it.
Now it's underneath there.
Then, the ideal material
and the most convenient material is rice husks.
We cover the whole thing with rice husks.
So we smother the fire.
Now you can use powdered bamboo leaves,
'cause what we want is a dry material
with a large surface area,
that's high in silica, that's the ideal material.
So we shred up, we put some bamboo leaves
under the lawnmower and shred it right up
and take it out the catcher and put it on,
or we use rice husks.
And we pile it up right over the fire
with the powdered bone on top of the red hot embers.
And it smothers the fire,
and it smokes out of the top of this chimney,
'cause it's a tall chimney it's going to draw the air out here.
And what's going to happen is, it's going to be a very slow burn.
So almost like a large cigarette ash slowly turning to ash.
And in the end after that second burn, it's extremely fine.
It's colloidal.
Now ash very quickly leeches,
so you don't want to leave it out on a day like today.
Because the colloidal material
will wash through and leech through
into the soil particles and be gone.
Now once you've got that material,
and it's cooled down of course,
you bag it up or you put it in a drum and seal it.
Now that material's got all the goodness of the bone
plus quite a lot of silica material
with the ash from the shredded bamboo, or the rice husks.
You can add that then into your compost.
You can add it into your worm farm.
You can add it into compost tea brews
where you're oxygenating highly oxygenated compost tea,
or you could probably just add it
with your mulch to your soil.
You've got material that is so fine,
it's got such a large surface area.
It will feed the organisms in the soil.
Now that's all we ever do organically,
we never feed the plants really, we feed the soil organisms.
And, say you've got a beautiful long-term stable material,
that you can add over time once you've made enough of it.
So you've got your own additive as an organic fertilizer
feedin' the organisms in the soil.