You might think that it is too early to sow anything, and you would be right for about 99% of crops that can be grown in my area. But the weather got warm enough this week to prepare my big greenhouse. It was a lot of work because I worked on the soil significantly.
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Firstly I used an old baking tray the whole winter to prepare a lot of charcoal from woodchips made from twigs cut off my hornbeam fence. I filled the tray with wood chips and put it in my house heating oven towards the end of the heating cycle each day. That way the produced wood gas is not wasted because it burns in the oven and is used to heat the house. And I got some fine charcoal at the end. In the picture is the tray filled with spruce board offcuts that I am using now to make coal of larger sizes. Unfortunately, the tray got deformed and cannot be used anymore, but about that soem next time (I made a better receptacle to make charcoal).
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I got about 100 l of fine charcoal but I did not make a photo of it. So here is a slightly blurry picture of approximately the same volume of charcoal of bigger sizes. This bigger charcoal will be put in plastic mesh bags and then used in the last filtering stage of my sewage cleaning facility. After it soaks up the phosphorus and nitrogen etc. from my waste water, it will be put into the compost and soil. In the meantime, I soaked the fine charcoal from wood chips in fertilizer and used it to complement the soil in the greenhouse rightaway.
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Some people sing the praises of this charcoal (aka biochar), some say it does nothing and it is just the fertilizer that is of use. I have no way of knowing who is right but I did find some scientific articles that got positive results with it and since I can make the charcoal without needlessly adding CO2 to the atmosphere and I need to use charcoal in my sewage cleaner anyway, I decided to give it a shot. It meant though that I had to dig up all the soil in the greenhouse and mix it with the charcoal in a ratio of approximately 9:1, also 10% charcoal by volume.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
You can see there were some bigger lumps of charcoal in there, those will probably get broken up over time. The wooden stakes marking the rows of my first sown crop are not very visible, but they are there.
Like I said, it is mostly too early for sowing anything but in my quest to maximize harvest from my garden, I bought seeds of three different varieties of radish. The first one can be sown at the end of February in the greenhouse, which is exactly what I have done. The second one can be sown in March, also in the greenhouse. And the third one will be sown in April outdoors. If it goes well, I should have a few months of steady supply of radishes.
Both greenhouse-grown varieties should be finished at about the time when I can plant my tomatoes and bell peppers in their stead. This way I should get two crops from the same space. I have done this already, albeit with only one variety, so it is not completely new and should work.
That seems very complicated.
I admire you for doing it.
I hope all that work pays off, I’ve read good things about charcoal too.
Have you ever considered the Three Sisters as a growing option?
@Rob Grignajin, yus, I do have plans to grow Three Sisters, although I will still use wood poles for the beans to climb. I am too high up and the climate here is usually too cold for corn to grow very tall, it rarely gets above my shoulders.