Ant the Potato King

The results are in, and Ant has won our potato grow-off by a mile!

Here he is in the photo with his "potato king" crown on, holding his most excellent crop of Kipfler potatoes.

These were the 'taters that we grew under mulch, on top of the old dead grass; now we've got some great Kipflers and an awesome garden bed to start growing lots of other veggies in.

Biochar in Central Africa

In a comment on my blog, Erich Knight pointed me to the work of "Biochar Fund", who are working in Cameroon with subsistence farmers (apparently trying to survive on under 50c a day).

It seems that they operate out of Belgium, and they are reporting some excellent results. It really does seem that the win/win/win cycle is very feasible - efficient stoves for cooking which also produce char which is used as a valuable agricultural input.

One piece of research that was linked from the Fund website is this trial here in Australia:

We actually harvested that plot this week and we've seen some amazing differences. Its a bit early to give you the exact data at this point in time, but we've seen probably double the biomass production and double the sweet corn yield where we've had high rates of biochar application in the soil. That's somewhere between 10 and 20 tonnes per hectare of biochar. And, yeah, we've had some very, very significant differences in corn production there.

That's really amazing - doubling the corn yield through the application of biochar!

TLUD: Second Attempt

Yesterday I completed my first TLUD gasifier, built by following Paul Anderson's plans for his "Champion 2008".

Today we gave it a couple more runs, this time using the spines of dry palm fronds chopped by hand into around inch-long pieces. Actually, in the first run they were longer pieces but I kept them shorter for the second, which was more successful.

Here it is loaded up with pieces of frond spines - I put some of the smaller bits on the top:

We broke up a couple of fire starter cubes into bits, and sprinkled them around the top to get even coverage. It lit up well and had a really good flame with very little smoke - our whole family toasted some marshmallows:

It settled into a really nice flame, still with very little smoke:

Towards the end, I started dropping in some big (thick) pieces of palm frond spine; that didn't seem to work too well and it eventually went out with them unburnt. I then blocked up the air (put the lid on the tin which forms the riser, and blocked up the air inlet on the side) - this is what I was left with:

The unburnt pieces are the ones I dropped in later, while it was burning. The rest is excellent char, except for some (bigger) pieces at the bottom; the lowest layer never charred. However, the quality of the char that came from the majority of the material was really good - it was black right through, and snapped really nicely:

So all up, it was a really encouraging result - enormous amounts of heat generated from a few palm fronds, and some great biochar produced. The questions that are still outstanding:

• Why didn't the lowest layer of fuel char?
• Should I be able to drop pieces in while it is burning? Why didn't those pieces char?
• I assume that there was plenty of primary air this time (since the material was quite chunky); is the 90mm secondary air intake too small? What are the symptoms of too little/much primary/secondary air respectively?

I'm looking forward to lots of burning over the coming weeks as we come to terms with this thing!

My First TLUD Completed

Yesterday I posted about TLUDs and biochar; today I built my first burner, which is Paul Anderson's "Champion 2008" design.

I began with a galv bucket and a 5L fuel can, a 25cm cake tin, a Milo tin, some plumbing fittings, some wire mesh and a few tools.

This is the completed unit, with the lid removed.

I filled it with dry palm fronds that had been through the electric shredder, put a squirt or two of WD40 on top to get things going, and lit it.

Once I put the lid on, the gasification was evident; there was an excellent flame burning at the top and very little smoke evident - huge heat though! Unfortunately the flame didn't last, and things started to smoke so I blocked the air up and then tipped the material out. Quite a lot of the fronds had become char (definitely hadn't burned to ash), but there were a few issues - such as the char front not progressing down the fuel consistently - and the fact that it went out.

From here, I'll be experimenting with different fuels and hopefully get some advice to get the thing burning in the manner I'm sure it's capable.

Intro to TLUD stoves and biochar

Lately I've become exceedingly interested in the possibilities for the use of TLUD stove technology in what we like to call the "developing world". I'll attempt a brief TLUD definition in a minute - firstly, the problem:

• Billions (somewhere between 2 and 3 billion, I believe) of people cook food over solid fuel fires/stoves.
• Over a million (between 1.2 and 1.6 million) people die every year from respiratory illnesses related to the smoke from their cooking - mostly women and children.
• The harvesting of firewood is a major cause of deforestation.

TLUD stands for Top-Lit Updraft, and in this case it refers to a very basic metal stove structure that functions as a gasifier - the fuel material (which can be quite fine material such as rice hulls) undergoes pyrolysis whereby gas is given off and then burnt, and very useful char is produced.

As I have tried to show in the diagrams, there are huge win-win possibilities in this.

I'm currently constructing my first TLUD stove, and I hope to complete it this weekend. I will then post some more details about it, as well as crediting the guys who have done the great design work on this technology and referencing some more resources.

Resources - Slope

One of the most important design features in a garden is slope - unfortunately, a lot of gardening methodologies do not deal with this at all. There are heaps of gardening books out there that tell you how to set up a bunch of garden beds and just assume everything's flat.

Even very small-scale earthworks can make a great deal of difference to drainage, water retention, etc. - in my place I had a reasonably minor slope into the back corner of the garden, which was allowing water to run off too readily. Additionally, I wanted to create a really well-drained area for planting a couple of avocado tress. The original slope looked like this:

The soil was really easy to dig by hand - quite sandy, and filled with palm seeds and other plant matter. There were a few other materials around - some rocks and some old concrete from a pathway or something. This is how the slope was modified:

The advantages are:

• Excellent drainage for the avocados.
• Less water runoff, water infiltrates the terraced soil rather then running down the slope.
• Mini swale provides a damper region for a row of lemon grass plants.
• Thick mulch of cardboard and palm fronds retains water in the soil.

Potato Progress

Back in July (winter) I posted about planting no-dig potatoes. This is a bit of an update on progress.

Basically, the plants are looking very strong and healthy but I don't yet know if they're going to actually produce any potatoes.

This is my patch of Nicola potatoes. They were placed on top of the ground, covered with mushroom compost, then composted grass clippings, then shredded palm fronds, then chopped palm fronds, and now sugarcane mulch. I used some palm trunks to create some additional edging beside them to keep the mulch piled up:

This is Ant's patch of Kipfler potatoes. They were planted at the same time and have had similar layers of mulch placed over them. The Kipflers took longer to come up and do not seem to be as vigorous, but perhaps this should be expected for a "gourmet" potato: