Transcript from video:

Courtney: What are y’all doing?

Zev: Stone’s giving me a sawdust snack. Pruning.

Courtney: What kind of tree is that?

Stone: Ash. Ah it doesn’t taste like ash though.

Courtney: Ash.

Zev: And we’ve been pruning black locusts and mulberries and this is part of the living fence around this field with the living trees acting as fence posts.

Courtney: What’s a living fence?

Zev: It’s when you use live plants for a fence instead of wooden or metal posts that will rot or rust and then the live trees become stronger over time and make all kinds of other yields like mulberry fruit and foliage for feeding to animals.

Courtney: Hello!

Zev: And we’re doing a special type of pruning called pollarding to keep the trees compact. Oakley and Stone have just been learning how to do the pruning today.

Courtney: Is this the first time you’ve ever pollarad at a tree, Stone?

Stone:  Yes.

Courtney: All right!

Zev: Yeah! And Oakley’s first time too.

Courtney: Intergenerational pruning.

Zev: So next year I’m planning to just be sitting in a hammock in March and they’re gonna be doing all the pruning. Isn’t that right stone?

Stone: What share of the fruit do we get?

Courtney Whoa negotiating. “What share of the fruit do they get?” You can have all the ash fruit you want.

Zev: Did you undercut that one?

Stone: Yeah.

Courtney This is the fence… this is the fence that the living fence and the living fence post that have already been pruned. You can see that’s already been pollarded and there’s um let’s see what is the living fence made from there’s mulberries, ash, black locust, and alder and then we’ve got hazelnut and muscadines and rosa rigosa, air potatoes.

Zev: All right

Stone: I don’t think we’re done yet.

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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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Have you ever heard of carbon trading or carbon markets? In our Converging Paths segment, we’ll learn about a fresh new take on this idea that will empower individuals, organizations, and farmers in Western North Carolina to take a different kind of environmental action.

Co-operate WNC—a regional mutual aid project for a regenerative future, led by Earthaven member Zev Friedman—is rolling out its newest initiative this spring. This offshoot, the Carbon Harvest program, is coordinated by Asheville resident, ecological designer, and educator, Mari Stuart.

Here’s how it works:

• Western North Carolina farmers participate as test sites. They put agroforestry practices to use to more actively build healthy soil, plus sequester carbon.
• Individuals, businesses, and organizations desiring to be more proactive in lowering emissions use funds to support these regional farms.

And voila, everybody wins! The money stays local, accountability is personal, environmental impact is concrete, and all of it is connected to nourishment through food. This regional model for carbon markets is markedly different from what is currently in existence, which tends to move resources on a global scale and between much larger entities.

One of the key features in the design process of the Carbon Harvest program is the organization of stakeholder gatherings. These sessions invite feedback based on the day-to-day reality of the various stakeholders, so that the organizational model works for everyone involved.

Earlier in the month, there was a stakeholder gathering for innovators and researchers. On February 27, there will be a Learning Circle and potluck. At the Organic Growers School Conference March 7 & 8, Zev and Mari will be presenting.

Co-operate WNC aims to have the pilot sites and initial participating entities set up by the end of 2020. For more information about this regional initiative, contact Mari at mari.j.stuart@gmail.com

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Celebrating elderberry season!

Walking in more than one Earthaven neighborhood in July, you would have enjoyed the dark, luminous clusters of elderberry hanging from both the older, taller trees and ones just beginning to bear. And while folks do harvest some of the white flower clusters earlier in the season, also enjoyed for food and medicine, it’s the berries that get folks out there with boxes and buckets.

This year, neighbors Susan and Bob Broadhead’s crop (at Full Circle) yielded many boxes and bags of goodness for families and herbalists across the watershed.

Soon, elderberry jams will appear, just for their deliciousness, and then the syrups, many doctored with favorite herbal extracts to boost the healing power of the berries, and to serve as season-changing tonics. Come Christmas, local herbalists will be selling a variety of healing concoctions made with elderberries. and those who haven’t made their own will be stocking up for Winter.

Varieties of Zev’s standard elderberry syrup recipe appear every year. What would you do with yours?

Zev’s Elderberry Syrup Recipe

 For 10 pounds (or about 1.5 gallons) of berries:
Cook elderberries slowly, on medium low heat, about 2.5 hours, adding 1/8 to 1/4 cup at a time of the liquid from a decoction of:

1) Appalachian Reishi mushroom, 2 cups
2) Maitake mushroom, 2 cups
3) Chaga mushroom, 2 cups
4) Burdock root dried, 1 cup AND

5a) for a preventative syrup, you can add 1 cup astragalus OR

5b) for a syrup to take once you get sick, you can add 1 cup osha root.

You also need 190 proof alcohol, (raw) honey, and apple cider vinegar in these proportions of berries to alcohol to honey to vinegar: 4:2:3:1.

After straining the decoction, cover the remainder with alcohol and set aside. Cook elderberry mixture till skins turn mushy—the consistency of thick tomato soup. Strain skins and seeds through a sieve and add to mushroom-root-alcohol concoction. Cook the elderberry syrup to a consistency between tomato soup and maple syrup. Let cool just to body temp before adding the honey. Mix in the vinegar and alcohol—also using the alcohol from the soaked ingredients.

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