Charcoal Making at the Fourth Corner Nurseries.

Charcoal Making
Rich Haard, Fourth Corner Nursery, Bellingham , Washington, March 31, 2007

Terrapreta interest group

Here is a set of images about our charcoal making project this weekend. It is a smothered pit method, first time for myself . We did open the lower end of the pit after 5 hours and take out about 40 gallons , then we put the unburned wood back in and recovered. We will be looking at it again in about 18 hours.

This will provide us with a charcoal treatment set for our container study on charcoal as a soil additive. Surly we will not make charcoal this way again but we will have a comparison between John's pyrolyser made charcoal to our small holder method.

This charcoal as well as our other experimental ingredients will be submitted to a complete analysis routine.

Best

Rich Haard,
Bellingham , Washington

Larry Williams may have more to say about our project later.

See March 31 Photos on Flickr

Some individual photos:

• Setting up the pit, slight incline ,about 18 inches front to back
• Laying out wet, green vegetation under the pallets
• A little over a cord of dry wood, alder, maple, birch , some doug fir is laid out on
• Shortly after covering
• Lower vent hole
• The charcoal making team
• Nice early evening view of our local volcano