Transcript from video:

Eme: Taking video of me peeling my bamboo shoots?

Courtney Brooke: Yeah what are you doing Esme?

Esme: Peeling a bamboo shoot!

Courtney Brooke: What are you gonna do with that bamboo shoot?

Esme: Eat it!

Courtney Brooke: What? You can eat bamboo shoots?

Esme: Yes!

Courtney Brooke: You can eat just all the bamboo shoots any different kind?

Esme: No you can’t eat the furry ones when the bamboo is like furry.

Courtney Brooke: Oh you can only eat the ones that don’t have fur?

Esme: Uh huh.

Courtney Brooke: Yep.

Esme: They’re always really furry like this inside.

Courtney Brooke: Let’s see?

Esme: They’re furry like this inside.

Courtney Brooke: I can’t quite see the furry, let me see?

Esme: They’re furry like this inside.

Courtney Brooke: Oh year, like little fuzz.

Esme: Uh huh, their fuz. Then you peel them and then you cook them fry them and then you can eat them.  And you peel the outside layers off…. but you see this?

Courtney Brooke: Yeah.

Esme: That’s what we want to peel off.

Courtney Brooke: Ah, Okay so then we just eat like the heart of it like the core.

Esme: Yeah, you only eat the core.

Courtney Brooke: Cool.

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Dimitri: We’re at Earthaven Ecovillage with Zev Friedman in the Hut Hamlet neighborhood. We are now watering this char that’s made from bamboo in this Kon-tiki.

Zev: Teensy micro Kon-tiki kiln, otherwise known as hickory nut pounding charcoal pounding vessel. Oh yeah..look at that beautiful charcoal!  What are we gonna do with the charcoal, Dimitri?

Dimitri: Well this is an experiment to see what the likelihood is or the amount of charcoal we could make if we made this thing six times bigger than it is right now at least…

Zev: Maybe more!

Dimitri: Yeah, maybe more maybe more! One of the impetuses of doing this experiment was because I’m gonna build an extension for my hut and we were thinking about using the charcoal with clay slip and some other potential additions depending on how our experiment goes…

Zev: Like lime…

Dimitri: Like lime and borax and some maybe fibers like shredded paper to help bind it to be infill for my walls. But then we realized also all the other amazing things you can do with this, by making tons of biochar. This is probably about two-thirds of what I cut down. Is this, what do you think?

Zev: Yeah… maybe five bamboo poles?

Dimitri: It be like six or seven right? Okay, yeah so about six or seven bamboo poles. This is kind of supposed to make it more efficiently burn so that you have a lot more charcoal at the end. Or I guess it makes it more efficient the amount of charcoal you have at the end. So this is just six or seven poles of columns of bamboo. Yeah we were just imagining what would happen if we took a lot more than that? So, welcome to this bamboo making process… Well, you can you’ll see us again in a few moments with a completed house.

Zev: With a completed house!

Dimitri:…And in just a few moments we’ll be back finishing the walls of my house.

Zev: Oh, yeah, that is some beautiful charcoal! I gotta say, clean.

Dimitri: And so there’s so many uses of what you can use this charcoal for the obvious one is you can put it in gardens.

You know what I do is I have a I have a urine trench that Zev actually taught me about, where  I have this like little trench and I just fill it up with charcoal and because it’s like also in contact with the soil microbes and my urine it helps charge it and after maybe a month or two I take out the charcoal and I put it mix it in the soil and to help give the soils nitrogen and some microbes.

Also, we have this grate here that we put in there so for the air flow underneath.

Zev: And that seemed to work pretty well.

Dimitri: Yeah all right all right and this is the end for now.

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Transcript of Making Bamboo Charcoal in a Kon-Tiki Kiln

Courtney Brooke: So I was coming to park in my driveway at my house and then it’s like well there’s a fire in my driveway. So now we’re going to see what’s happening with a driveway fire. Something is happening here. It’s Dimitri in his natural habitat.

Dimitri: (Natural Habitat Monkey Noises)

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing Dimitri?

Dimitri: I’m making charcoal. Biochar with bamboo and with this little metal cone-like structure which is some people call a kontiki kontiki.

Courtney Brooke: Yeah okay so you cut the bamboo down is that bamboo dry?

Dimitri: It’s six, it was cut six weeks ago, so it’s not fully dry because we’re in winter time. Once We’re going into spring, but you could see that it’s duller than usual.

Courtney Brooke: Okay so you cut the bamboo, now you’re over here, and you’re making it into charcoal.

Dimitri: Yeah and like as you see ashes here you see like the ashes here, that’s when you want to add more bamboo to it.

Courtney Brooke: And then you’re squirting with the water hose?

Dimitri: Not yet. At the end.

Courtney Brooke: At the end. yeah okay. And then, and then, this is something that you already made?

Dimitri: This is some of this is the first batch we made in there.

Courtney Brooke: there so that was that’s how much came out of this contiki kiln.

Dimitri: yep

Courtney Brooke: Okay what are you using this for?

Dimitri: Well what inspired it was to maybe use it as infill like insulation in my walls of this new um extension of my hut i’m making for to have a kitchen basically and so we’re thinking about this being insulative because it has all these tiny holes in it and let’s check it out and um yeah and there’s so much surface area and little tiny  holes and we thought that it could act as a nice insulation also being great for the earth because  now we’re like storing carbon in my walls for probably decades or centuries

Courtney Brooke: That’s so exciting.

Dimitri: Yeah, um but then there’s just like so many other ideas around using this like we can you can make also adobe bricks you can like have it for agricultural use like we could make we’re thinking about maybe like what if we got a um a blacksmith to like weld a six-foot version of this so yeah like we can cut these into like six foot lengths and put in way bigger chunks and like make way more biochar for like the community for all the different uses and like have them in our bamboo grove so like like utilizing them bamboo that we’re basically just cutting because they’re just spreading into the roads and just leaving the carbons up going back into the atmosphere but now we could actually utilize it so we could have  charcoal we can like put in our gardens our farms um you know so many like keep it in room spaces to help with mold and smells

Courtney Brook: Hooray for charcoal. Okay well stay tuned for for how it all works out with Dimitri’s building project.

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Several weekends in a row this past April, we had the pleasure of hosting college groups from the College of Charleston, Furman University, and Elon University.

We dig bamboo, but how many shoots can we eat?! Bamboo needs maintenance to keep it from overextending its boundaries. Here, students help remove bamboo sprouts from a former mini-grove. The voracious grass was coming too close to home and residents chose to remove it.

Earthaven’s Group Educational Tours (GET) program offers tours and experiential learning opportunities for student groups year round. Service-learning programs are increasingly popular and have become a hugely successful complement to traditional academic learning environments. Hands-on learning allows participants to create an authentic connection with their world and embody academic lessons more fully, while enhancing critical thinking and teamwork skills.

Students from Elon University help Johannah Femling start a layered “lasagne garden” at the Forest Garden Learning Center. Their Philosophy prof, Anthony Weston, also worked on the site but was out of camera shot.

We view education as primarily a social learning activity. The process of immersion into an active, living culture of sustainability solutions, critical thinking, and  systems orientation makes for not only an integrated, holistic approach to education but a rare opportunity to see experiments in action. Please inquire about how your group can get a taste of the integrated life through Earthaven’s GET program.

Students from Furman University in South Carolina and Wes Dripps (center), Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, helped members build a stairway up the grassy slope to their home.

NikiAnne Feinberg has over a decade of experience with experiential, nature-based programs in both the non-profit and academic sectors. SOIL is the manifestation and culmination of her life experiences in sustainable living, experiential-education leadership, and program management.

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Previous owners gifted Earthaven’s main street with a healthy stand of bamboo that’s now prolific near the Forest Garden Learning Center. Early Earthaven members added additional stands around the community.

What a beautiful and useful plant (we thought)!

Bamboo IS beautiful. AND useful. But like a beautiful and useful animal, bamboo has to be trained and maintained. Otherwise, despite one’s love for it, IT WILL TAKE OVER!

We had the naïve idea that if bamboo is planted between natural “barriers,” such as creeks and roads, you don’t have to worry about its invasiveness. Think again. Bamboo spreads, like any grass, in every direction through networks of rhizomes and root mats. Although it may be stopped by a road bed or other deep boundary it’s definitely hard to control. If it gets close to a road, come heavy snow and ice, it will lean down frozen and stiff and block traffic.

Excavation to remove Bamboo from the Bellavia pond.

One year, we tried making eating bamboo shoots an incentive to control one stand, but the thrill of eating them didn’t seem to justify all the effort to prepare them. This year, encroachment on a building became too risky to ignore, and a major excavation was undertaken. It will take several years of pruning as new sprouts emerge before we can consider the job done.

Now all neighborhoods and the commons are being managed for bamboo to stop its spread. Harvests are providing material for future decorative and useful experiments.

The post Lessons in Bamboo: Love it but Don’t Leave it Alone appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

          Overall, we were pretty cozy and content, and we know that the White Blessing is just what the water table and the soil need for extra nourishment. There hasn’t been much snow here in many years. Oh, but then the thawing—paths and roads as mushy as mud stew. Gravel patches to get through the worst of it are all we can expect until the roads do their own version of “mending” and are solid enough again to let repairs last.

Arjuna da Silva is an Earthaven founder, Culture’s Edge president, and former Airspinner. She is coordinating the Natural Building School and Fundamentals of Permaculture workshops at Earthaven this summer.

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Community can sometimes be an un-peaceful place, as we deal with a myriad of personalities and the rough edges of unresolved issues. And even when we are feeling peaceful in community, we can still feel deeply unsettled by our knowledge of war and oppression in the world. Of course it’s not a bad thing to be moved by the plight of others, but at some point we need to collect ourselves, enjoy what we have, and creatively make our contributions. Thinking about this led me to the idea of creating a peace garden at Earthaven, where those in conflict might sit with one another to work it out, those feeling inner conflict might find some serenity, and those wanting a deeper and quiet connection to nature could find it. Community is a busy place. Perhaps the peace garden can also be a place to just slow down, or where friends can have a quiet conversation. A conversation could be entirely different in quality if it took place in a quiet, beautiful setting.

The peace garden at Earthaven, which was begun in February 2007 and should be finished by summer, is situated in the heart of the community, yet in a secluded area where bamboo grows and two creeks converge. It will have a peace pole, pathways, benches, fruit trees, and a living fence to separate it from a parking lot. An entrance archway can be added as members offer their creative suggestions and labor.

Another idea has sprung up, not yet approved, for a small bridge that would connect the garden with another park area.

After beginning the planning for the Earthaven peace garden I came across reference to another such garden in Tamera, a community in Portugal; at O.U.R. Ecovillage in British Columbia; and at Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community in Tennessee. It seems there is a growing world consciousness that we must have peace. I like that we let our visitors know that we hold this value and make room on our land for a place to express it.

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