Terra Preta - Dark Soil - Experiment

[medi-useA]

SilverSurfer_OG..I just found this thread...have read the first page and bookmarked it to read completely....

HOWEVER

...I too have seen a documentary about this stuff...
@least I think it was this stuff...
Anyway, in this doco they were stripping the first 20 cm or so of this soil and selling it....
they left the rest....
I cannot remember the timespan but they left the area alone and the darksoil Layer 'regrew' itself...

Have you tried making your mix and inoculating your garden or yard with it to see it's effect?

If you have a grassed area, you might try it there...the effects would be most noticeable...somewhere you won't be digging for awhile...

As I have yet to read the rest of this thread {but plan to!} I do hope this suggestion does not make me look like a tit!

muA

 

[SilverSurfer_OG]

Yeah thats a good theory Fista... i noticed my charcoal fairly soaked up the smell of putrid piss and dead worm soup... seems like my worms just love to drown themselves.

If the original Terra Preta sites were kinda reclaimed land then maybe the pottery adds structure and stops the whole thing washing away?

I too am blessed with nice orange/yellow/brown clay and lotsa stones!

Going to be digging a trench soon to make charcoal on the garden bed.

All my compost and recycled mixes are now in the ground and have some nice plants shooting up!

Yeah that is an idea Medi.. until now most gardening has been in containers. Dont know if at this point i can harvest the old stuff and innoculate but i will see over time. Thing is i love to use every organic trick i can think of so its hard to say which is making most impact..

 

[xmobotx]

Thing is i love to use every organic trick i can think of so its hard to say which is making most impact.

thats what i call bio diversity

 

[jaykush]

http://quicksilverscreen.com/watch?video=47861

heres a documentary about terra preta. dont stop it right away they dont even mention TP until later in the flick.

 

[goldking]

I Figured it out!

I Figured it out!

I hope you all had a good Christmas and have a great and prosperous New Year ahead.

i have yet to find any info on the ancients haveing BioChar kilns or covered pits that they used to slow burn the organic materials in a low oxygen enviroment. which would mean they could have only made ash/charcoal like any other wood burners.

so it is Obvious that they filled all the and 1000s+1000s of clay pots with wood and their poop and other organics and put them in their fires, makeing Biochar and leaveing behind vast quanitys of pottery scraps.

and concerning the 1000s and 1000s of acres of TP fields with miniscule to 0 amounts of pottery shards, it only proves they recycled the pots and used them over and over again.

LOL hehehehe it could have happened that way.

OR! maybe the fields were just Slashed and Burnt,(leaveing ash and charcoal?) then were cultivated and fortified with composts (made from organics and the 1000s of folks own poop) after all they had no domesticated cattle etc back then.

and if they added more burnt material/ash and more compost all the time over the years,(like we do today) it would have provided viable farming for ages,
and the soil would be leached black by the rains to this day.

normal slash and burn farmers just move on after a few crops because the soil is depleted.

this makes sense to me, but thats just me..

when i build my BioChar kiln this spring, now i have a way to dispose of and recycle used potting soils too, their only promix and perlite and nutes..

my new TP type potting mixs will be recycled and refortified...my old soils used to be given to friends to help their poor native soils, but hauling it around and haveing herb plants pop up in their tomato,squash gardens caused some stress and explaining to their neighbors inquireing minds.

some plants were actually stolen???

Stay warm, GK

PS. I was starting to believe the baked clay was a Miracle ingredient and i was collecting money to set up a manufacturing plant near a vast clay field and make the clay into little balls and bake them. and sell them and make $$$$$$

then a friend told me thats just Grow Rocks, isn,t it???

now i have to give all the $ back :-( LOL

 

[onegreenday]

If you surf a little you may find how they make char.
The smoldering wood is covered and starved for oxygen
and becomes char.

Very low tek

The pic's demo is on the net, as I've seen their method before.

 

[goldking]

bio burn

bio burn

Onegreenday, do you remember where you read that info, in the last 6weeks i now i have read 150+pages on line about TP, i don,t remember anything about covered burns, but that would make something more like biochar then just charcoal.

does it state where the process was recorded all the centurys so we today know how it was done????..the only thing i know that remains is on a molecular lever. a black stained layer of earth and totally decomposed and (returned to dust/nature+-) charcoal and organics.

and being bio or regular char would be hard to distinquish after all the years IMO anyway

i suppose the people of today were handed down the methods and still make it the same way.

i suppose a pit full of organics set on fire and covered with some earth would cause a slow burn, but then the burn pits in the fields would remain as deep depressions full of black earth, instead of a fairly uniform layer...

probably a pit hasn,t been excavated yet..the TP is so vast it would be easy to miss?? if it was done in pits that is??

guess i,ll just read a few more sites...it can,t hurt to expand ones brain..

stay warm GK

 

[onegreenday]

There's a video ou there of people charing tree sapplings in a reduced oxygen,
low temp environment (just a pile basically) maybe some mud on the outside to seal it.
I remember the video. Video may have come from one of those bio-oil companies with the char bi-product.

 

[jaykush]

i am pretty sure they mention it in the video i posted, its near the end if i remember right.

 

[onegreenday]

i am pretty sure they mention it in the video i posted, its near the end if i remember right.

if it was any closer Jay it would have bit us.......

 

[Strains]

Great thread, if none of you mind ill post this link up as it also got some interesting info and thoughts about terra preta, most of you prbly allready know this but its still good i think. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4522

heres a quote from the bottom of the page :

Heckenberger also examined the terra preta pockets in the region, which is described briefly in an interesting article by Charles Mann in The Atlantic Monthly called "1491".
Scientific American also notes the correlation between the lost cities of the Amazon and terra preta in "Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized", as does The Vermont Quarterly in "Pay Dirt".

Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients from terra preta fields; instead the soil, so to speak, fights back. Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. "Apparently," Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, "at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate—even regenerate itself—thus behaving more like a living 'super'-organism than an inert material."
In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

"When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh." Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything. "

Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.

 

[onegreenday]

General Hydroponica is selling Alaska top soil;
only a matter o time before TP in grow shops......

 

[goldking]

1greenday, someone ones selling Ak top soil??? the garden suppy shops here sometimes bag up the crap in their back yards and sell it but its just flat land silt based , dense heavy crap.

the gravel pit/fill and top soil Business,s dig up their place, mix it with local peat and truck it to places..but your saying General Hydroponics??? is what? bagging it like promix and selling it online ,or something like that.

would you let me know where this site is..i can,t find a Gen Hydroponica site anywhere??

can,t find any at Gen Hydrophonics either???

the 24/7 summer sun heres causes a lot of veggies etc to grow like mad,but does not allow for outdoor grows :-( but i never heard about any soil here worth buying, unless you need a truck load of silt/peat mix to cover the silt and gravel in your yard.

stay warm GK

 

[goldking]

last night, CNN had a item on BioChar in a India farmstead, they had a huge mound of soil at leats 8' x 12' cone shaped and they said it was a wood pile sealed in O2 free to keep the carbon in the charcoal to save the world??? ( allways little snide comments from CNN) but if the Bio char is burned for fuel, the carbon gets in the air anyway.

they also showed a farmer with of a handfull of dirt with a few scraps of charcoal in it, and he was putting a hand ful under each plant, they said those plants grew 2x as well as the others. sorry folks, but no matter what is said, a piece of charcoal thrown under a plant won,t do anything. maybe serve as a speck of mulch at most???

the cone shaped mound in the story looked guite impressive and very uniform for a pile of dirt on a wood pile, but when a man with a basket of mud layed a ladder on the pile and was smearing the mud, it seems like it could have been a permanent charcoal kiln, cause the ladder didn,t leave the slightest impression in the fresh dirt pile.

it was probably the kiln the charcoal maker had been useing for ages, dressed up for the news,

and not a fresh pile of dirt?? so maybe they didn,t even know their charcoal was actually Biochar.

this is the type of crap CNN does to get a story, fake/modify the physical stuff, and just report the story.

i could be wrong LOL


CNN recently faked the PETN explosive test on the piece of aluminum plate to help scare air traveler into accepting anything to be safe during flight(like Body scan Xrays and much higher fares.)

stay warm GK

 

[onegreenday]

1greenday, someone ones selling Ak top soil??? the garden suppy shops here sometimes bag up the crap in their back yards and sell it but its just flat land silt based , dense heavy crap.

the gravel pit/fill and top soil Business,s dig up their place, mix it with local peat and truck it to places..but your saying General Hydroponics??? is what? bagging it like promix and selling it online ,or something like that.

would you let me know where this site is..i can,t find a Gen Hydroponica site anywhere??

can,t find any at Gen Hydrophonics either???

the 24/7 summer sun heres causes a lot of veggies etc to grow like mad,but does not allow for outdoor grows :-( but i never heard about any soil here worth buying, unless you need a truck load of silt/peat mix to cover the silt and gravel in your yard.

stay warm GK

man u outa the loop.
GH is huge; surf man ; surf......check catalog...

yah alaska dirt like gold

20k year old forest humus teeming with benny microbes/fungi

never seen by man.........

 

[maryjohn]

goldking, you should do some basic searching on bio char. Some of your comments are ill-informed.

 

[onegreenday]

well Goldy we don't burn the char so we stor it in the ground; taking it outa the air.
the off-gas when we make char can be burned for energy but the CHAR we keep 4 a long time in the soil.

the char harbors the bacter/fungi whick aid's growth along with hold nut's slash water,
but as been posted;

maybe when the roof o the char 'factory broke they buuuuried &
it added properties to terra preta.

if they made char in kilns/bowls of clay but that a lot of work.
I like the dome/clay/mud top o char pit; like said before.

when the smoke stops; they smack/break the top & save
the china pieces for soil.

 

[xmobotx]

goldking, you should do some basic searching on bio char. Some of your comments are ill-informed.

while I don't share g/k's opinion, I will readily admit that his input here has definitely driven this discussion

there are varied thinkings on how the TP was developed and what may have been intentional - I for 1 have definitely benefitted from his considerations

in your "trick thread" on senescence you demonstrate a similar determination to drive the discussion w/ "gray info"

 

[Strains]

Great post ^^

+ rep

 

[jaykush]

i don't even think we can recreate True TP personally. but we can learn from it to improve our own soils, and maybe it will have some similar properties.