Action4Canada - May 20, 2023


A4C Prepper Dan Making Soil and Bio-char Vlog3


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

144.77841

Word count

1,848

Sentence count

1


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode I talk about how you can make your own compost from leaves and composted manure to improve your vegetable yield and increase your yield in your raised beds and raised beds. I dig out some of the best soil I have in the woods and talk about what you can add to it to make it a really nice soil for your veggie garden.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 well today we're gonna have kind of like a clean dirty talk we're gonna talk dirt
00:00:08.160 in a lot of urban centers today you can go to local stores maybe a grocery store a garden
00:00:16.800 center near you and you can buy bags of dirt pre-made but you really got to be careful with
00:00:21.900 what's in those bags a lot of this stuff may say earth or dirt but when you actually open
00:00:27.840 up the bag all kinds of stuff in there that you don't really know what it is I like to make my
00:00:33.720 own now mind you I live on some acreage here so I've got the capacity to do that I have some
00:00:40.260 livestock so I can make manure I've got a hardwood and softwood forest there's lots of leaf litter on
00:00:46.500 the ground I've got a wood chipper and so I can make my own wood chips I can also it's got a big
00:00:54.600 popper and I can also put some leaves in there really break stuff up but I'm going to show you
00:00:59.760 a way that you can make your own as well and at least you can supplement what you can buy at the
00:01:05.340 store if you absolutely have to and you can end up with a really nice composite soil to really increase
00:01:14.160 your vegetable yield so let's come a little closer and I'll show you what I have so I have two big
00:01:19.680 piles of manure here well really it's it's a mixture of manure it's a mixture of shredded newspaper that
00:01:26.160 I also put in a chicken pen I do have some compost in here particularly on the other pile is where I
00:01:32.100 start my things and this pile here has been here for about eight months now now throughout the winter
00:01:38.460 when it would snow the snow would hardly even stay on this pile because it would heat up so much
00:01:42.780 it's cooled down quite a bit but may be hard for you to see here but I see all kinds of little bugs
00:01:49.440 crawling on here right now in this pile it looks kind of dry but when I pick it up here
00:01:55.260 it's got a really nice consistency here there is quite a bit of organic matter in here but what you want
00:02:04.080 with this kind of soil is you want to be able to make a ball and for it to have some consistency like
00:02:09.840 this this will hold the moisture quite well in a raised bed which is where I do most of my gardening
00:02:15.480 and just going in through here now I'm going to have to turn this over a little bit too because it
00:02:21.040 hasn't quite decomposed quite enough I have been putting some fresh stuff in here but the further
00:02:26.520 in I dig here the more the soil oh I do have some bark in here as well but the more the soil is really
00:02:35.720 good and I'm going to be able to add this at least to the bottom of some of my my beds here and as
00:02:42.680 you can see the soil down here is going to be a real nice additive to the new raised beds and I'm
00:02:48.140 going to build this here nice and clumpy and this will hold some moisture so I'm going to be mixing this
00:02:57.860 with some of the better soil that I have that I'm going to show you here in just a minute
00:03:01.700 now this pile of dirt here may not look like much actually may look a little bit dry but when you look in
00:03:13.640 here this is a mixture of a lot of dry leaves that I put in here last year a lot of composted manure and
00:03:20.240 this is like really nice black dirt oh look there's some worms in here too and this is what you really
00:03:28.640 want in here as well there's a little where did it go oh it just disappeared but this nice mixture here
00:03:44.540 will hold hold the the moisture really really well and it will make a really nice addition to the soil
00:03:53.240 mixture that I'm going to use it's got a lot of organic matter in here too that will keep decomposing
00:03:58.520 just a little bit but it's nice and loamy it's nice and light now it still has some old roots in that
00:04:10.100 that I'm going to filter out and that a few a few sticks as well but this is all help with the aeration of
00:04:17.480 this pile as well and it's a sizable pile too I'm just going to back up here so you can see and I've moved
00:04:26.060 this around with the bucket of my tractor quite a few times and it literally just sits in the woods here in
00:04:32.960 a section that I had to dig out to get some dirt to level off a spot for my for my sawmill but it
00:04:40.400 literally just sits in the woods it does get sun it's down the little woods road that I have but it's
00:04:48.800 been baking for about a year and a half and there's probably enough in here to fill about I'm going to
00:04:55.340 say about five raised beds that I'm going to be building and I use all kinds of leaf litter that I get down
00:05:02.000 in the woods like this I just collect it put it through my wood chipper so it breaks down nice and
00:05:07.440 small and again if you can just make a pile of something like this anywhere in your yard now I had
00:05:15.680 this covered with a tarp also for I'm going to say about three months just to help it bake a little bit
00:05:22.040 let me take another little bite in here and this just looked like a pile of leaves and mulch and all
00:05:30.020 that but basically this is all it is and it turns into some nice really organic looking material just
00:05:37.940 like that and I can see a bunch of worms in there as well
00:05:39.940 so
00:05:47.860 so
00:05:55.780 so
00:05:57.780 so
00:06:05.700 so
00:06:07.700 so
00:06:17.620 so
00:06:19.620 so
00:06:29.540 so
00:06:31.540 so
00:06:41.460 so
00:06:43.460 so
00:06:45.460 so
00:06:57.380 so
00:06:59.380 so
00:07:13.300 so
00:07:25.300 well let's talk a little bit about biochar biochar is something i do a number of times during the year
00:07:35.380 i've got a number of these five gallon buckets you can pick these up well you can look on
00:07:46.580 facebook marketplace or a few different places
00:07:48.900 uh this one's uh this one's getting a little bit rusty but what i do is i fill these with uh
00:07:55.780 softwood or hardwood softwood is not as dense but just junk pieces of wood that i have laying
00:08:02.740 around as you can see in my forest i've got all kinds but i do a lot of woodworking and i end up
00:08:08.180 with a lot of pieces of just junk wood and what you want to do is you want to light this on fire
00:08:13.460 and when your wood gets very white almost to the point where it's going to disintegrate and turn
00:08:20.260 into
00:08:21.700 just ash
00:08:23.140 you douse it with water really quickly so that it turns into
00:08:28.660 charcoal
00:08:30.500 and
00:08:32.340 charcoal like this buried in the ground will not disintegrate it will not rot matter of fact it will
00:08:39.060 last for 50 years
00:08:42.740 so this is good for your garden but it has to be activated so this like this not going to do much
00:08:48.260 for your garden so what you want to do is i've got some big pieces here that aren't quite burnt enough
00:08:53.620 so i'll have to break these down but what you want to do is you want to break these pieces into smaller
00:08:59.140 pieces so i've got a mallet here and what i do over here on this table is i just break these up into smaller
00:09:04.580 pieces here and then they fall through the cracks so what i do is i take one of these bins
00:09:09.220 i usually put put it down underneath and then i just scrape this all down until it falls down
00:09:14.340 below and i'm not going to do that right now because i'm not ready to activate another another
00:09:20.020 portion of it but what i'm going to do eventually with this is i'm going to fill this to about three
00:09:27.060 quarters of the way then i'm going to take some fresh manure that i have now i've mentioned before i do
00:09:33.060 have livestock here i've got chickens and i've got some rabbits but i'm going to take some fresh rabbit poop
00:09:39.620 you may say i don't have rabbits so what do i do well you can go to your local
00:09:46.740 grocery store right now or your farm supply store or wherever they're selling bag dirt and you can buy
00:09:53.540 yourself a bag of sheep manure or bag of cow manure or if you know somebody that's got any kind of fresh
00:09:59.140 manure you can buy a bag of that and you mix it in with this that's not possible you say
00:10:05.620 well i don't want to gross you out but human urine is something you can use so a couple of bottles of
00:10:11.940 that you save it up for a few days and you pour it over this mixture now you want small pieces okay
00:10:18.020 this about this size is what you want okay and you pour it on this put a lid on it set it aside for
00:10:26.500 about a month and that will activate it with good bacteria and what this is going to do is
00:10:34.900 i mentioned this earlier a piece about this size if you were to unfold this with all of the cellular
00:10:42.500 structure in this it would it would defend it would take up about the space of a football field with
00:10:52.420 all of the cells the fiber cells all stretched out and this would hold all of the good bacteria in
00:10:58.420 your garden your garden needs good bacteria the anaerobic bacteria in there to work in order to
00:11:08.660 be activated in order to have some anaerobic activity in your garden so again i usually make three of these
00:11:18.100 buckets at a time and i probably do this about four times a year now you don't need a lot in your garden
00:11:23.460 you really don't this much here would probably do me about five big raised beds and by raised beds i
00:11:29.540 mean four feet wide by eight feet long and once this is done you just basically scatter it in with
00:11:34.980 your dirt mix it in leave it you don't have to keep replenishing this every year once this is done it's
00:11:41.460 done you leave it for 50 years and i ain't going to be here in 50 years so i hope you find this helpful
00:11:47.140 well thanks for joining me for another episode of uh dirt talk and we hope to see you next time so
00:11:58.020 happy planting and hopefully next time we'll get into some real planting our weather's getting warmer
00:12:04.500 here in the east coast and so thank you god bless you and god bless canada
00:12:20.420 so
00:12:36.020 so