permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

I'd love to get Elaine Ingham's take on the contrast between:

On Nov 11, 2013, at 5:18 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

> Hmm, in our climate compost makes itself. 

and

>  only bought in charcoal from a well controlled 
> pyrolisis installation will have good results Toby. Back garden charcoal 
> making is not good enough. Almost impossible to get and maintain the right 
> temperatures all through the charcoal.


Because Elaine says that most compost is garbage, so if we are going to hold 
the biochar folks to the high standard of carefully controlled temperature 
and oxygen levels of pyrolysis in technical equipment, I don't think its 
right to talk about compost as something that just makes itself. To quote 
Elaine, from what Lawrence posted on Nov 2:

> a sign on a pile of organic matter
> that says "compost", does not in fact make it compost.

 
> If the material is 70% cocoa color, rich earthy, old-growth forest
> smell, wide diameter, colored filamentous fungi present, good numbers of
> flagellates and amoebae (aerobic protozoa) and beneficial
> nematodes present, then it can be called compost.

She has written often that most of the samples of compost that she is given, 
backyard or commercial, are nearly dead, far out of balance microbially, and 
give mediocre to poor results in soil and teas. Most people are used to 
terrible compost, and although adding bad compost is probably better than 
adding nothing, we're mostly very cavalier about how we make it. If it 
doesn't get to 140-160F (60 to 70-ish C) and various other characteristics, 
it's not going to have the right microbe mix in it, and Elaine says we 
shouldn't call it compost.

I'm just sayin'. Compost is any old pile of rotting stuff, and we love it. 
Biochar has to be perfectly made under controlled conditions, and we still 
hate it. Hmmm.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com