Beneficial biochar

Biochar is one of many organic substances that can be added to soils to make them more fertile. What is it? What does it do? Why is it worth using it in addition to organic fertilisers? Where can you get it, or how can you make it yourself? 

Backyard Biochar

In the Amazon basin of South America heavy rains leach soils of nutrients very rapidly. Local Indians found that adding charcoal soaked with beneficial liquids prevented this. This soil additive is now known as biochar. Ready-to-use biochar is not cheap. In this blog post Food Garden Group member Dirk S. explains how he makes biochar himself, at no cost.

Online food garden chat August 2020

On Sunday 16 August 2020 the Food Garden Group's last online food garden chat for the 2020 winter season took place. We talked about snow peas and peas, beans, biochar, green manure, Oxalis, citrus fruit, Chilean Guava and the layering propagation method. Below is a summary of the discussions.

Online Food Garden Chat May 2020

On Sunday 17 May 2020 the Food Garden Group's first-ever online food garden chat took place. We talked about aphids in Brussels Sprouts, biochar, improving soil, weed mat, wicking beds, moving an olive tree and carrots.  See below for a summary of the discussions.

Start of Season workshop 2018

It was the start of Spring 2018, time for a Food Garden Group’s Start of Season workshop.  The topics of this year’s presentation by Christina Giudici were propagation, seed raising mixes, potting soils, rooting hormone and biochar. This blog post documents some of what Christina covered in her workshop.

Making Compost - part 2

In this second blog post on making compost we look at what people make compost in, and tools and gadgets that can be useful when making compost.

'luxury' compost bays at the Botanical Gardens in Hobart