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Biochar kiln progress
I recently did a second and third burn in my biochar kiln, tweaking each time. The story is best told in pictures: Upon detailed inspection, the April test burn actually gave good results. Four white...
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Sunflowers
Most of what i’ve been up to on the farm recently relates to biochar, but to keep this from becoming an all-biochar blog, here’s a bit about the garden. I grew a patch of sunflowers this summer,...
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Biochar: from kiln to pit
Those of you following the biochar-hawaii list know that i’ve stopped using my kiln, and am now focused on making biochar in a pit. This is both for reasons of scalability and wear; my 55-gal steel...
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New document on Tea in Hawai’i
The full name of the document is “Specialty Crops for Pacific Island Agroforestry: Farm and Forestry Production and Marketing Profile for Tea (Camellia sinensis)”. It’s online at agroforestry.net (or...
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Farm biochar flowchart
How does biochar fits into our farm? I scribbled a flowchart onto paper, and today put it into the computer; it looks like this: Ideally, it’s a continuously flowing cycle; there is no “waste” and no...
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See the tea in Google StreetView
The farm is in a very rural, remote location – which is why it’s so surprising that Google actually got around to driving the neighborhood – but they did. You can even see the bottom part of our tea...
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Biochar and Tea
I spent the month of September 2011 back on the farm, getting it into shape and making batches of biochar. At the end of the month i took a truckload of the char down to Josiah’s biochar operation in...
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More on Tea & Biochar in Sri Lanka
More about growing tea with biochar in Sri Lanka, from an eariler comment on this blog. 1. “Biochar: Can it put the tea industry back in the black?”, Dr. J.C. Krishnaratne,...
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Farm visit fall 2012
I’ll be back on the island from August 24 – September 15 – to work on the farm, plant tea plants, split firewood, make compost, make biochar, and experiment with lots of cool stuff like making native...
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Farm visit: pictures, lots of work done, rotary sifters
I was going to post pictures of the farm from the visit, but my girlfriend beat me to it, so you can see: Details about the land. Tons of work got done during the 3 weeks there, including: Took down...
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Biochar pit sizes and volume of production
It’s been seven years since I posted anything to this blog, but it’s a reasonable place to put things I’ll want to refer back to, so… There are currently two biochar pits. Pit 1 is the original, and...
View ArticlePotatoes, Summer 2020
We’ve always grown potatoes occasionally, since I was growing up here, but recently I became more interested in really knowing potatoes and hopefully increasing production. To this end, I started a...
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CTAHR Potato Trial: planting day
Today I examined the seed potato that we got for the trial. 7 varieties. Many were starting to decay. No doubt proper potato storage would involve a temperature or humidity controlled environment, but...
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Biochar pit volumes, and prices
Concerning volume. In my previous biochar post, I summarized that my two rectangular lined pits were producing around 1.3 cubic yards of char per firing. Since then, I’ve been told that a simple...
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CTAHR Potato Trial: update, blight
Here’s the chronology on the potato trial: 2020.07.20: planting day 2020.08.16 (day 16): all the potatoes have emerged and are growing nicely, except for the smallest varieties (Laratte and Papa...
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CTAHR Potato Trial: Results
I did the harvest today, and here are the results, in terms of grams of potato per plant: Yukon Gold 144 Dark Red Norland 113 Kennebec 283 Red Gold 244 Kattahdin 75 La Ratte 13 Papa Cacho 27 This is...
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Gasoline vs. Battery-Electric Mower
I bought a new lawnmower on 2022-05-13 – here’s a comparison to my previous mower. Toro model 20340 (“Toro Recycler® SmartStow (22”) 163cc Personal Pace® “)Makita XML08 (“36V (18V X2) LXT® Brushless...
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Powerful Battery-Electric Chainsaws
After a few weeks of research, I think I know what new chainsaw to buy. The DeWALT DCCS677 with DCB615 battery For context, battery chainsaws have not been considered “serious” in the past compared to...
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Chainsaw Milling: What I’ve Learned
I’ve spent a couple weeks researching, and this is what I’ve learned about milling your own wood with a chainsaw, and in particular a battery-powered chainsaw. Note that I have not actually done any...
View ArticleLithium Battery Tools: A Table
Power tools are slowly moving from gas to battery, and dozens of companies are jumping in. Some are big general companies that have making battery tools for a long time (Makita, DeWalt) and some have...
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