The Wyrm: Full Swing Project

As of Saturday my friend Paul will have delivered to me two further bins, between the five bins that he has delivered and the two I can make of cinder blocks I will have accumulated seven bins in total out of the fifteen that will be needed to finish the project. The tarp which will block the sun from the worm bins and keep the heat at a minimum has been delivered as well and is ready for installation into "The Wyrm" along with two 50 gallon barrels for water storage/catchment and another 50 gallon barrel that Paul picked up for us along with a couple of small fish tanks to be used for Aqua-Char experimentation, yes I just made up a word, Aqua-Char, remember it, it may be important.

Wednesday should mark the final day for Tomato production in the two greenhouses (we will have tomatoes through December, but production will be finished up by Wed.) and Thursday will be spent installing the tarp and moving the existing worms to the new bins along with the two lbs of worms I recently ordered from some new friends in Kentucky and installing the first two water catchment barrels, by this time I also plan to have acquired a further six barrels for water catchment. We have also purchased the plastic and the PVC to line the bins with for compost tea recirculation and to also be used as a compost inoculate and fertilizer ingredient in Bio-Char.

All in all, things are moving along nicely. The fish will come in a bit later, big updates on all of this to come soon.

-Alan Reed Bishop/Bishop's Homegrown/Hip-Gnosis Seed Development

A Short Bio-Char Video

Here is a short Bio-Char video I found on youtube. It is interesting but not particularly informative in any way that may be useful. Two things in the video that I should point out. 1. It really seems that people are having a hard time realizing that char in and of itself is not at all a fertilizer, that fertilizer has to be applied to the ground or to the char so that the char can absorb and slow release it. 2. One of the speakers mentions something about growing bio-mass in order to make bio-char, I completely disagree with this idea in every way possible, it is akin to growing and using land that could be used for food production for bio-fuels. Now if you want to use agricultural residue, that is fine, but growing bio-mass just for bio-char seems to defeat the purpose in my opinion. Sometimes folks have to realize that they can't have their cake and eat it too.

And yet another new idea concerning Terra Preta!

I was replying to a post over at Patricks Bifurcated Carrots blog about his response to my Terra Preta blogs and decided I should probably post part of the relevant text here for others with an interest in this ancient technology to see:

Basically my new idea is; why bring the worms to the charcoal when you can bring the charcoal to the worms. In other words I will create my charcoal, soak it in a nutrient solution and then apply it to my worm bins in the new and improved worm house I recently blogged about. In this way the charcoal (which will be buried in the 36″ deep bins) will be able to absorb nutrients from the worm castings/compost and will also be inoculated by the beneficial soil microbes. Of course this will be applied in a two layer hill system as described in my original blog and will still entice the local endemic earthworm populations as well as the local endemic soil micro-organisms to come check things out but then there will be less waiting as the majority of the nutrients will be laying in wait for use by plants, as the nutrients escape the worm castings they will be caught up by the charcoal (which is slowly releasing the nutrient it was soaked in as well as the worm casting/raw compost nutrients), In such a way I will have created a time released version of worm castings/compost and implemented a very simplified form of Terra Preta on my farm.

I genuinely think I might be onto something with this. After all the heating of "the Wyrm" house will produce the needed bi-product of charcoal to place in the bins making it a one stop process in the digestive section of the new worm house!

Expanding my ideas and horizons concerning Terra Preta

Above you can see one of the buckets of newly produced char as a byproduct of our heating the two greenhouses. I'll leave it up to your imagination to figure out which high nitrogen all natural ingredient will be used to amend the finished product.

As you can read in a post from a couple days back that I posted concerning Terra Preta and Bio-Char I have decided to write down and expand upon some of the ideas I have regarding this valuable ancient technology.
(repost from http://alanbishop.proboards60.com)
Don't be too quick to think scientists and organic proponets know exactly what the natives were doing yet, no one has been able to recreate Terra Preta and where I think they miss the point is by not trying to fully understand how it is done (minus anthropologist and archaeologist who are working to figure it out), the bio-char folks simply took the simplest part of the method, the slow release of fertilizer element, and tried to make that into a soil science of it's own, one that in my eyes is mostly doomed to fail for anything other than sequestering carbon. Not that I don't believe that Sequestering Carbon is an important reason to explore this technology because it most certainly is, but if it's done on a commercial scale and garnering commercial profit it will be out of the reach of most ordinary people in the first place.


Here are a few theories I have thrown out myself:

-Accidental development of initial Terra preta by early natives. Using manure and slow burning plant material to fire pots which busted, successive generations of natives continued this tradition in the same area (large pot making industry?) sometimes pots would bust, fires are always built on top of old burn sites using old charcoal as smoldering material, activating a new layer of charcoal. Over time beneficial agricultural practices were developed by accident and happenstance. This would explain the presence of so many pottery shards, activated charcoal, and the manure for OM.

-Layering strata to draw in microbes and worms. Probably still by happenstance originally, un-needed material is dumped in trash pits, natives notice microbial and worm activity expanding and enriching soil, they then start to layer materials in such a way that will entice microbial life and endemic earthworm populations to inhabit and work the strata. The pot shards serve as a tilth mechanism? What are the pots made of? If they are terra cotta or ceramic then they are porous, will hold water and nutrients just about as well as charcoal?

-Perhaps expanding upon this theory we take the next step. Explaining the presence of large unbroken pots in the Terra Preta, we can look at them as a form of formulated sacrifice. Sacrificing a pot for fertility but in this case maybe there is more to that! Could it be that my second theory is right but instead in this case, they were brewing soil inoculate (beneficial microbes? plant tea?) in pots which could then be sacrificed to the terra preta earth as fertility? They could be broken on or in the soil (working as a aerator with bits of tile and ceramic pot) or buried whole to leach out over time? Either way someone was putting a lot of work into these pots, some appear to be in relatively good condition, this to me could show evidence of sacrifice for fertility.


These are just some of the ideas that I have. Either way in the next few years I will be experimenting with these theories and watching the understanding of Terra Preta technology (notice I didn't say bio-char for a reason) expand and then becoming disseminated as it should be to the general public.

I definitely encourage all interested to experiment, particularly if the charcoal can be produced or obtained as a byproduct of other necessary activities (wood heating and so on).