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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Who better to start a fire than the “fire warden” of your local safety committee?

My neighbor, Marjorie, stood firewoman duty around a burn of dead and diseased tree stock and other brush that she and neighbor Gaspar recently set on an overcast day that promised to rain … sooner or later! (It did finally begin to drizzle as the sun set.) The next day came a downpour.

When the charcoal that remained from the well-burned, pre-ash wood was dry enough, neighbors began collecting the precious bio-char to help nourish our orchards and fields for generations to come.

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Video of Appalachian Machu Picchu

Transcription of Appalachian Machu Picchu

My dream is to take wood waste at Earthaven and turn it into biochar.
And to release insane amounts of heat.
A 55-gallon barrel of wood turned into charcoal releases a quarter million BTUs.
And to take that heat and run a small scale-up ethanol plant.
Take the waste heat from the small ethanol plant and run a small scale bio-diesel plant.
Take the waste heat from the small-scale biodiesel plant and run a small scale bio-gas plant.
The waste product from the bio-gas plant is liquid nutrient and soak the biochar in it to nutrient load it.
Take the remaining effluent and saturate it with sawdust from like John McIntyre saw mill with it.
And make worm compost and then inoculate the bio char with the beneficial microorganisms in the worm compost.
Creating a no waste, ever cascading stream of industrial ecology on a village scale.
Where people can take the resources we have with us and provide, in essence, I mean according to our lifespans eternal soil fertility to turn this valley into an Appalachian version of Machu Picchu.

Something like that.

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