a naturalist is more a poet than an engineer

— Ramon Margalef

I have a small pile of sticks and coconut shells that have accumulated in the garden. As I can’t compost them, I thought I’ll make some biochar to use in the garden. Looking around a bit, I found this low-tech way of making biochar and I think its a good simple way to start.

The allotment garden page where I found this video also has an article about how to charge or activate biochar

Unlike other natural systems (e.g., a coral reef or tropical rain forest), the agro-ecosystem always contains a particular “keystone” species. That keystone species is Homo sapiens. It is a species that engineers its own environment far more than any other species in history, a fact that would make ignoring its ecology naïve; nevertheless, its “ecology” involves a structure that no other species has ever had. It has the ability (or is it a need?) to communicate ideas from individual to individual, perpetuated to heights that are magnitudes larger than any other organism in the history of life. That is, our species has language with which it creates structures of culture and society, of economics and politics. As the keystone species in the ecosystem, our special nature becomes part of that ecosystem. The agroecosystem is thus endowed with not only traditional subjects of ecology, but also with the immensely complicating aspects of this particular feature of the keystone species.

— John. H. Vandermeer (Preface, The Ecology of Agroecosystems )

“All that effort is ultimately going into trying to make something that is effortless.”
— Andy Goldsworthy (Rivers & Tides)