A Few Words About Soil

Welcome Home! https://www.facebook.com/events/629355177195511/?ref=2&ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming This is the route to finding more about bio-char. For some reason it is not looking like links usually do. Another way to find the event is to check out Greens and Grains, and their events calendar.

Char is an ancient technology. By liberating about half the energy from wood, driving off the combustible gasses, it becomes super light and on a microscopic scale full of fissures, much like a sponge or scaffolding. Carbon, transformed by plants into cells creates a matrix of tubules that are the perfect size to be utilized by microbes. The very bacteria, fungi and protists that are necessary for healthy soil. There have been reams and reams of paper and vast quantities of ink spilled to get across the concept of food webs and pyramids. We all understand the hydrologic cycle to so,me extent because we are taught things about our surroundings that seem to be no-brainers.

Just today I was reminded about how much we focus on a specific scale. Birds, butterflies, what mt biology teacher used to call creepy crawlies, fish and fowl, bison and deer. The vast majority of our attention has been on the same scale as our own limited perception dictates. "Life size" to us is the scale that we are familiar with and the one we dwell in virtually all of the time, but if we look a little closer, we see a much more important realm. Microbes can inhabit healthy soil at astonishing rates. In a single teaspoon (5cc) of soil, there can be 1,000 to one million algae, 100K to one million fungi and 100 million to one billion bacteria. Sounds incredible, because it is!

The reason that adding char to help recover depleted soils is because most of these organisms colonize surfaces or seek protection from marauding large organisms in microscopic crevices to survive. Char has both in amazing amounts. There are fourteen acres(5.66 ha)of surface area in each handful. come to our char seminar this Sunday in beautiful Door County. If you cannot make it, send donations so we can post a video class on youtube. Appreciatively, all those working to protect and serve soil microbes.