DIY Soil Enhancer Conditioner Booster with scrap wood. Kick your garden/potting soil into high gear #CaptainWingnut

Hey, Brad from Cougar Ridge Ranch, high in the Uintah Mountains of Utah, 7,000 feet up. We're making biochar today, and as you can see the pile behind me, that is just some of the debris. We put it in this burning barrel, and we burn it, and then we put it out when the coals are really nice and red coals, and then that leaves us with charcoal, and we grind that up and make biochar for soil amendments. It's phenomenal, and for those of you watching, I now have a gimbal, so my handshaking, my permanent handshake, is not affecting the camera. I'm really sorry about that. This time of year, we typically don't need a permit to burn in our county, but because it's a high fire year, our county is requiring a permit. So we've got our permit, we're ready to go, and so we're going to set fire to this baby and let you have a ringside seat to watch. Now just a disclaimer for any of you well-meaning people who have an aversion to fire and burning, this is something that's done in the ag community all over the world. This is how we very responsibly deal with the debris that's created on the ranch in the mountains everywhere else. There's a few other ways to do it that are economical and beneficial. These are some piles of chips from our wood. These piles are over 10 years old, and you can see I've dug around a little bit in there. 10 years old, they're not decaying, does not go away. This is redwood and pinion, and it just does not decay. It's what you use as decorative wood. We have got piles like this all over the ranch, just everywhere. We've got another big pile right over here, huge pile, and we use this as ground cover and other things, but we just have so much of this all over the ranch. The Forest Service finally came to us and said, listen, you should start burning. When you burn this wood, the acid is released and physically changed, chemically changed. So just as an upfront, burning is pretty normal. I won't answer any comments if you have trouble with my burning, because that's what we do. We've got our fire wagon here ready to go. When the fire is done, when it's just all red coals, and I'll show you that in a little while, then we douse it. We light up the fire wagon and we soak it all down so we stop the coals from burning so that we get that nice charcoal. So here we go. Let's get this party started, get this fire burning, set the house on fire. There we go. So now we're going to put some diesel on the wood. It doesn't cause fumes that'll attack you when you light it. It doesn't really have a flare up. It's like lighting a barbecue. And then I just go along with a lighter stick and or a propane torch. I don't remember what I had here. I probably have a lighter stick. Propane torch is a little bit faster. But just set it on fire and it doesn't take long for it to get going. So let's talk about what we do in the wintertime. We make a big pile through the summer. Once the fire season starts and we can't burn anymore, we start piling it up in a big open area up on the ranch. And we make these big piles. And then in the wintertime, January, February, when it's a lot of snow, we'll set up and set this baby on fire and we'll burn all of this pile down until we have a huge pile of biochar again. Then we'll gather it up with the tractor later on after it's all stopped. The downfall is we have to set the water, the fire trailer up and take it up and put the fire out or we get just a pile of ash. So we have to still bring a bunch of water in. And so we have to pick a day when it's not going to be terribly cold, when it's not going to be close to zero where the water's freezing really fast. But this is what we do in the wintertime. And you can see how it just burns the snow away from quite a ways. So back to the task at hand. Things were coming along just fine as we're burning in the barrel. It was a lot more wood than we had expected. We were doing everything that we could to keep that fire going, but the fire only burned so fast in that burning barrel. And we were noticing that we were piling it in with the tractor and we were piling it in by hand and we were just losing ground. We were putting more in the pile next to it than we were getting into the burning barrel. So we called the fire marshal and he was actually about to call us to see how things were going and told him that, you know, we were just weren't making it. And he's familiar with our property and where this secondary pile was. So he said, light the whole thing on fire. You got the permit and you've got the area. So we lit the whole thing on fire and we still didn't get finished until late in the evening. But it was it was a good thing that we did that because we'd have never made it for a one-day burn permit. Okay, time for another disclaimer. I know some of you may be well-meaning, but this is how we work in our community, in our county. It may not be legal to burn where you're at and you may have an aversion to it, but this is how rural America works. In fact, this is how rural world works. And especially out here where we're at, this is Cedar and Pinion. We've had this property for so long. The roads were graded in in 1964 and we can still cut firewood on the trees that were pushed down that long ago. That's like 50, 60 years ago. That is a long time and they're still not rotten. They just don't rot. You could haul them off to the landfill. All they'll do is fill the landfill. So the way that they have us deal with them here is we burn them. And we used to just burn them and burn them into nothing. Now we burn them down to the coals and we'll put the coals out and use them for biochar. So I know if you're well-meaning and you don't want to see somebody burning, it's what happens. You need to get out. You need to get out and see the world. So here it is, all of the charcoal. And just about out. I'll have to put a little bit more water on it. And here's the big pile over here. I'll let this dry out for about a week so that it's dry. Then we'll come up and trailer it down to another part of the ranch where we've got a grinder set up and grind it into little tiny pieces and grind it up with some composted chicken manure that we've had composting for a year. And that'll activate it and it'll be phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal for soil. Everything is telling me the batteries are dead. Gimbals, GPS, drones, little cameras, big cameras, all the cameras, everything's dead. It's been a long, long day. I'm going to get some rest in about a week. We'll grind this up, finish. See ya. So the coals have had about two weeks, a little less than two weeks of drying time from all of the water putting out the fire. And I loaded them in the black trailer here and we're going to go shred them into little pieces so that they amend into the soil. Okay, here we go. Oh, that is noisy and dusty. I put two scoops of charcoal and one scoop of composted chicken manure. Don't put uncomposted raw chicken manure. It's way too hot. And that just mixes in really well. And it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. I put about an inch of that across the top of my garden and then I till that in to about six inches above my tiller tills. And that just totally changes the behavior of the soil. I mean, the plants just explode. We saw two feet more growth the first year we put this in. And we do this about every other year to our garden, just to make sure it takes out the acids that the plants don't like. The toxins, I might say, plants like acid. It just releases the fertilizer slowly, releases the chicken manure slowly. It absorbs water and resorbs that back to the plants. Resorb, is that a word? I don't know. Gee, with all my education, you'd think I'd know that, huh? Releases. How's that? Releases. This is Brad from Cougar Ridge Ranch. Subscribe to us. Like us. Follow my wife's site on Kawaiigirlsoap.com. And look at the beautiful things that she makes. And it was wonderful having you, wonderful letting you take a peek into what we do. And remember, this is what we do. Use your education, use your mind, read, and do what you do. All right. Brad, Captain Wingnut from Cougar Ridge Ranch, signing off. So long.