A thousand years from now, an archaeologist will be scratching his head over a pile of broken pottery and animal bones, trying to recreate The Good garden.
I haven't solicited for pottery, but I'm a teacher who ain't too proud to beg when it comes to materials for class. I have often put out collection boxes with a small note explaining why I would like people to discard their items in my bin and not the trash. If you would put up a sign at a local garden shop soliciting broken terra cotta for a terra preta experiment, I'll bet you'd get more than you could use. Love the idea. I've been interested in the terra preta for tha last thirty years. Good luck with your experiments.
I've been getting old coffee grounds, tea, and eggshells from a local restaurant. Getting a grinder or blender of some kind is a must, as a pestle and mortar will take forever. Good luck
@@GamingGardeningAndLayingSiege try a tort ! (can with one hole in a fire) Might be worth running your coffee through a tort. I save my own coffee & make char from it. Is pre ground so no dust & is magic in the compost. I wonder if the eggshells might render down too. Hopefully below the 900c to make quicklime from them. .
Thank you for watching! I want to help at least 10 gardeners start a functioning food forest by Halloween - come and join my community today and get started: www.skool.com/the-survival-gardener
It is an absolutely great community. Great like-minded people ready to help with good feedback and ideas. Doesn't matter if you are just starting or an expert, you always learn something new.
I watched a few videos on ancient pottery use (in europe, but the ideas should transfer) and something that struck me: unglazed pottery was used for cooking vessels, but only for a short period of time before the porous ceramic became infused with bacteria, etc. and had to be discarded. I wonder if the process of infusing the pottery with calorie-rich substances, and/or allowing large cultures of human food-eating microbes to develop might be another piece of the lost terra preta recipe. I suppose I'm saying: maybe lacto-ferment some pickles in the next batch of pots before you break them.
So happy to have found your post when I bought a house built in 1912 and dug the bk yd for a garage. Found the coal, pottery, etc. But freaked out when finding the bones my sister told me to call the police for. You saved me from that.
The cut to, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, you playing puppet with a skull, scratches that itch in my brain for a true David The Good video on a new way to do an old way of making fertile soil.
And adding the slow mo of the destruction of pottery! 😂🎉 Many of us long time DTG followers are like fist pumping the air. Terracotta is pretty porous and the pottery back then most likely was not completely cone 10 vitrified. Bones burned, that’s Bone meal ! The guy falling into the pit back in the day stoking the fire that was probably equivalent to blood meal. Eew..
If you have a local Community College (or even a High School) that has pottery classes, get in touch with the teacher/s and ask them for bisque fired pottery that broke during firing/was left behind a the end of the year they would probably be happy to give you as much as you want!
Love your terra preta experiments! One theory that I have, is that the original soil had some kind of beneficial bacteria (thus the biochar and the pottery, giving a lot of "housing" for the microorganisms. I think that, maybe through time the soil finally "breeded" a type of organism capable of creating better conditions around). So, maybe adding some of that original terra preta into your experiments could contaminate your soil and create a beneficial-microorganism growth-boom. I think that a company used to sell bags of it some years ago, but I don't know for sure. Anyways. Other theories that I have are that, it could have something to do with the "charging" process of the biochar (a sustained, yearly and natural process), or with the use of legumes and somehow creating a rhizobium bacteria colony in there, regardless of the crops planted. Love the skull puppet btw.
"adding some of that original terra preta into your experiments could contaminate your soil and create a beneficial-microorganism growth-boom. " I totally agree - I wish I could get some to experiment with!
Unfortunately haven't tested it myself but I'm pretty sure you could get 90% of the way to Terra Preta by just making about one third of the soil charged biochar. "Just" being a massive understatement because that'd require a heck of a lot of charcoal.
Very interesting! I hope you'll do side-by-side beds with terra preta and common compost - y'know - for science, or more importantly, to satisfy our curiosity on how they compare at growing. 😁
The simplest Terra Preta is human poo inside large pots and charcoal, all tossed into a pit that got filled over time. No turning needed, the other stuff like bones is just extra. If you can't find enough clay pots, you can make your own terracotta balls. I make them from clay by hand, toss them into the campfire and then have tons of substitute for pots.
@samuelkorger3567 in this context, it is safe if: - There is a large amount to go thermophillic - It is deep enough - It is undisturbed for several years - This is meant more for perennials and not for annual crops
The trick to making Amazonian terra preta is to dig a firing pit for your pottery, fire your pottery, smash up the pots that did not turn out right. Then use the pit as a midden and latrine until it is three quarters full, finish it up by dumping river sand and leaves until heaping. Start the next one to replace the pottery from the year before and have all fresh midden/latrine.
There's a 2001 a space odyssey vibe going on here, gotta love it. The talking skull had me laughing, and thinking it's resembling terror preta. Hop we see you guys in Bali some time for a coffee
Solid follow though on your second Terra Cotta drive. Well balanced, weight shifted through the target and stick drove down the center of the fairway. Lifted up on your first. Keep it up. o/
I went full terra pretta nerd too :) I'm using 100yo hand made roof tiles (complete with cool thumb prints!) I tried to get the bits smaller than 1/2", was a bit concerned about sharp edges in my beds when I'm rummaging around in them in future, so I stuck all the broken pottery in a cement mixer for 1/2 hour, worked a treat to take the edges off, I'm also trying different char charges, going with the theory the amazonians were using big pottey shallow dishes the size of molasis/rum dishes to make a form of kimchi over the fire and some cracked which formed the char infused with LAB, so I make charcoal in a 55gal drum on it's side with a 10" slot along the side style (by far the easiest method I've tried for large batches), then quench it with 20 gallons of LAB (and a hose to make sure) some I've put in a plastic kids paddling pool with JS compost to charge it over a few weeks, going to do one batch with the mineral balancing mix when I've worked it out (will need a S. Solomon level mathmatician when my soil test results arrive lol) some I'm cycling thu the thermophillic compost (with added chicken carcasses) I've got 7x 2ft deep beds of loam soil to play with different mixes/charges, I'm in the middle of prepping enough to do it all over this winter, collecting enough wood is a challenge!
If you find a hazard somewhere the safety rule is you either eliminate the hazard or make awareness of it and use some PPE to protect yourself from the hazard.
My soil experiment has been going since picking up the subject of ancient civilizations after many years. Been going since about march last year. I started with some basic potting soil, and some coco peat, then started gathering material from the surrounding area for composting. The parking lot in my building has a large Maple tree, and they are only too happy to be rid of the leaves. Unfortunately living in a city and only having indoor space to work with makes this a real challenge. I found and started breeding worms, and bringing in some biology from the outside and making biochar to add. I have not thrown away soil at all. At this point every time I turn and sift my compost containers to harvest, it just keeps expanding. I haven't been to nursery in months. I then simply add half of one of four 45 liter worm bins, as I rotate through 22 containers (currently). Tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, lettuce, spring onion, apples, avocado, granadillas, basil, corn, mulberry, and countless brush cherry seedlings. Hopefully I can get some sort of business going. Fingers crossed. Love your videos mate. PS. Got my first machete the other day. This is going to be fun.
If you spread small, gravel sized, lumps of dry clay onto your active burn pit they will fire to terracotta. Once clay is fired even to that low level there is a chemical change that is irreversible, *dehydroxylation.* At temperatures above 1800°F (980°C), hydroxyl groups (-OH) begin to break down and release water vapor. This reaction is irreversible, as it leads to a permanent change in the clay's molecular structure. It may help to premix the clay with carbon to create a hybrid terracotta-char particle, this will also cause changes in the iron oxides within the clay and thus have a potential influence on even its magnetism. I don't think this has been empirically researched in modern times!
I love these types of experiment, as they can sometimes lead to findings that more rigorous studies can have a harder time picking up on, as they generally try to limit the number of variables, and sometimes interactions are highly complex and involve a high number of variables. For another perspective, many scientific studies have been done on broken crockery pieces in gardens, and they've failed to show any related improvements, with other approaches towards soil health show much better results. So, breaking crockery and adding the pieces here is almost certainly wasteful, or at least unhelpful and likely misleading, as whatever positive results this approach achieves, those are highly unlikely to be caused in any way by the addition of crockery pieces.
As we are trying to recreate the work of long-dead gardeners, I do not presume to know more than they did, so I am sticking to what has been observed in the soil strata. You may be right, of course!
I eagerly await your results! I was surprised to learn that things like carbon foam are some of the best for capturing energy from the atmosphere(far better than say tinfoil)...I suspect thats a big part of its function in the soil. They've also made exceptional batteries from soil and microbes, so there is an obvious connection.
I listened to a French professor who thought that the indigenous people went to Venezuela to take easily accessible crude oil to leave the biochar soaked. This was how he loaded the biochar
There may be an ingredient that you are leaving out that might help considerably. I know you are familiar with the Chinampas of Mexico. Their key ingredient for their soil is the silt from the rivers and canals. It is said that even today their soil will hold enough moisture to feed a seed for a month before it needs to be watered again. Maybe you have added it and I missed it. Sorry if that is the case.
Did you add additional fungi? 🍄 Excess nitrogen from carcases helps break down the cellulose of the woody debris and goes especially well when you add mushrooms and mushroom compost. Moulding down fallen leaves also 👍
They actually sell a ceramic soil mix additive. Its called a ceramic clay pebble for aquaponics. I believe it would basically do the same sort of thing as broken pottery. Of course there is always a cost with an additive.
You should try some earthen fired pottery, use some local clay. Mabye fire it when your making your next round of bio char? You would have to harvest more river clay.... get those 11 kid to work ;)
Can we replay the classic refrain again at the end of another video? "Be good to your mother, and always say please, be loyal to friends, and compost your enemies!" Sorry if I got any of it wrong. Thanks!
Dig along a river in the dry season. Go as deep as you can and use the dirt to build walls. Make a water gate in the walls! Fill with dry brush and other things. when the rains begin, burn it off and open the water gate to drown the fire. When the river crests, close the gate to save fire and silt. By next dry season, do it again, then again planting crops early in the dry season, harvest, add brush. Burn. Flood.
I wonder about the use of burning the bones in the terra preta. I can see how bone meal can add useful calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium to soil, but does the fire really help break down the bone? Sure the fire can convert weeds and wood to charcoal and potash and cook meat scraps, but aren't the bones the same as they were before you threw them in the fire? They don't seem to burn. How is bone that's been in fire any better than regular or ground up bone?
Take a kiln cooked clay brick and put it in a tray with an inch of water. In the right conditions it will wick until the brick is wet throughout. That is the reason for the terracotta’s in soil
I saw a TH-cam video about it, they stacked chunks of pottery on top of each other, wet the bottom, and it wicked all the way up to the top of the pilr
Are Terra Preta just remnants of a huge fire calamity that swept through the Amazon? Then survivors grew on top of it? It's been described as a layer over everything a few feet under the topsoil. The world has had a few major catastrophes, the Younger Dryas 12k years ago and that flooding event 6k years ago. How well does the Terra Preta align with either of those events?
🇺🇸🙋♀️ That's not the usual statue style of Mother Mary at the end , so Im wondering what Saint that was? Loved the Bible verse! ❤️🙏 I'll check out the garden link.
I seriously seriously seriously doubt that the broken pottery has anything to do with fertility. So, I think you pretty much nailed it by calling it a cargo cult style imitation
All the arrows point to the components of terra preta being things that retain nutrients in rainy environments where they will otherwise leach out. Those same soils tend to be acidic because the available calcium has gone bye-bye with the rainfall. In these environments (maritime, tropics), anything that returns calcium to the soil (hello, bones) and then helps it stay there (biochar) is good. But, more to the point, even if they started getting built up as a trash pile, I think humans were smart enough to recognize the fertility and start to do it on purpose as a cultural solution to multiple problems.
i know for a fact Biochar at 10% works, here in Australia with dry soil, similar climate and rain to you DTG, i dug biochar 1 foot deep ( 30cm for the rest of the world ) , and planted an apple tree, i also planted 10 apples trees nearby but in less dug soil, the biochar tree grew faster and more branches than the other 10 trees, all trees got compost and chop n drop mulch, but no tera preta, i now put 10% biochar and 1 unburnt cow/sheep leg bone in all pots, and several chickenbones ( chicken bones break down in 2 years i seems, cow/sheep last longer ). i am yet to experiment with burnt bones,
Sir! Check out Gary’s Gardening channel , he runs a nursery in SoCal, talks about the *duff* _dead stuff_ layer - and share my hack! I’m using a good old toaster oven and left over chilli cans (and now a left over rice cooker pot after the rice cooker broke) , filling it with bones and food scraps and covering it with aluminum foil and running it on max temp overnight. Semi-Instant terra preta! Instead of hundreds of years, it takes about 12 hours 😊
Poop Terra preta might have been night soil treatment and other organic waste disposal pits. Varieties of aromatic woods burnt atop to mask the smell and clay pottery shards that required disposal doubling as additional odour control
When I was living in Costa Rica I saw old pottery shards all over the country, in the north and way down near Panama. Apparently the indigenous people broke a lot of brown clay pots and just left the pieces. Perhaps terra preta seems to have a lot of pottery shards just because the people who used the pottery broke it a lot. I got the impression that the jars or pots were of low quality, maybe "fired" next to the cooking fire. Anyway I wonder if they put the shards in the terra preta intentionally or incidentally. Also Costa Rica has a lot of black soil that hasn't been modified by people. It's just volcanic dark soil. But there's a lot of clay there too, a lot like Georgia clay. The mix is pretty fertile.
i think your missing some key points ^^ back then they would have thrown everything they didn't want into that pile. can you imagine what that would have smelled like while it was fermenting like a giant Bokashi pit! spent grains old clothing you name it.
You just created a pile that could have been left behind by a deluge or mud flood. The collapse of a Vapor canopy would be a possibility. Silt happens…❤
I discovered a slightly less ancient Terra Preta in my yard while digging out a new garden bed a couple weeks ago. I found plates and cups and Ball canning jars with zinc lids that were made in the 1890's. I also found a bunch of 6" square nails that are in near perfect condition and several horeshoe nails that weren't in good condition.
![ปฏิเสธไม่ไหว (Crush on you) - LIPTA feat. No One Else [TEASER MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VC689EgdSIw/mqdefault.jpg)
A thousand years from now, an archaeologist will be scratching his head over a pile of broken pottery and animal bones, trying to recreate The Good garden.
😁
I haven't solicited for pottery, but I'm a teacher who ain't too proud to beg when it comes to materials for class. I have often put out collection boxes with a small note explaining why I would like people to discard their items in my bin and not the trash. If you would put up a sign at a local garden shop soliciting broken terra cotta for a terra preta experiment, I'll bet you'd get more than you could use. Love the idea. I've been interested in the terra preta for tha last thirty years. Good luck with your experiments.
I've been getting old coffee grounds, tea, and eggshells from a local restaurant. Getting a grinder or blender of some kind is a must, as a pestle and mortar will take forever. Good luck
@@GamingGardeningAndLayingSiege try a tort ! (can with one hole in a fire) Might be worth running your coffee through a tort. I save my own coffee & make char from it. Is pre ground so no dust & is magic in the compost.
I wonder if the eggshells might render down too.
Hopefully below the 900c to make quicklime from them. .
I wonder if broken pottery was water retention and release
Thank you for watching! I want to help at least 10 gardeners start a functioning food forest by Halloween - come and join my community today and get started: www.skool.com/the-survival-gardener
If only it was free 😭 but I get that’s kinda not the point!
@@GLG_YTPeople almost never take free advice. I want people to succeed, and that takes skin in the game.
It is an absolutely great community. Great like-minded people ready to help with good feedback and ideas. Doesn't matter if you are just starting or an expert, you always learn something new.
@@davidthegoodEarly machete video's, David has shared his share of skin 🫱🏼🫲🏾 Be good David, continue spreading good 🙏🏼🤗
Looks good. It should be ready to use in about 200 years.
What
Lol 😆😆
LOVE the broken pottery slo mo!
Your terra preta videos have been my absolute favorite so happy to see another one!!!
I watched a few videos on ancient pottery use (in europe, but the ideas should transfer) and something that struck me: unglazed pottery was used for cooking vessels, but only for a short period of time before the porous ceramic became infused with bacteria, etc. and had to be discarded. I wonder if the process of infusing the pottery with calorie-rich substances, and/or allowing large cultures of human food-eating microbes to develop might be another piece of the lost terra preta recipe.
I suppose I'm saying: maybe lacto-ferment some pickles in the next batch of pots before you break them.
That's a really fun idea.
So happy to have found your post when I bought a house built in 1912 and dug the bk yd for a garage. Found the coal, pottery, etc. But freaked out when finding the bones my sister told me to call the police for. You saved me from that.
The cut to, Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, you playing puppet with a skull, scratches that itch in my brain for a true David The Good video on a new way to do an old way of making fertile soil.
And adding the slow mo of the destruction of pottery! 😂🎉 Many of us long time DTG followers are like fist pumping the air. Terracotta is pretty porous and the pottery back then most likely was not completely cone 10 vitrified. Bones burned, that’s Bone meal ! The guy falling into the pit back in the day stoking the fire that was probably equivalent to blood meal. Eew..
Loved the pottery carnage montage. (we NEED more of that).I think a small sample of actual terra preta might house some microbes we are missing here.
If you have a local Community College (or even a High School) that has pottery classes, get in touch with the teacher/s and ask them for bisque fired pottery that broke during firing/was left behind a the end of the year they would probably be happy to give you as much as you want!
Please keep posting videos showing plants growth with this Tera pretta
Love your terra preta experiments!
One theory that I have, is that the original soil had some kind of beneficial bacteria (thus the biochar and the pottery, giving a lot of "housing" for the microorganisms. I think that, maybe through time the soil finally "breeded" a type of organism capable of creating better conditions around). So, maybe adding some of that original terra preta into your experiments could contaminate your soil and create a beneficial-microorganism growth-boom.
I think that a company used to sell bags of it some years ago, but I don't know for sure.
Anyways. Other theories that I have are that, it could have something to do with the "charging" process of the biochar (a sustained, yearly and natural process), or with the use of legumes and somehow creating a rhizobium bacteria colony in there, regardless of the crops planted.
Love the skull puppet btw.
"adding some of that original terra preta into your experiments could contaminate your soil and create a beneficial-microorganism growth-boom. " I totally agree - I wish I could get some to experiment with!
@@davidthegood the difficult part would be sourcing the origins of the soil, but surely there must be a way!
Making all Dave's look good David the Good. Thanks for all the great info!
The nomming animal skull... 😂😂😂 Pure DTG gold!
Unfortunately haven't tested it myself but I'm pretty sure you could get 90% of the way to Terra Preta by just making about one third of the soil charged biochar.
"Just" being a massive understatement because that'd require a heck of a lot of charcoal.
Very interesting! I hope you'll do side-by-side beds with terra preta and common compost - y'know - for science, or more importantly, to satisfy our curiosity on how they compare at growing. 😁
Always gonna watch tera preta or dark soil in general! Love it!
Always a pleasure to watch your videos. Thank You ❤
Didn't expect the ventriloquist bit, but liked it!
That slow mo golf swing through the clay pot was both a good swine, and very satisfying to watch.
the pig skull bit was funny and really enjoyed the slowmo pot smashing. great video and info
Raised Bed Peter here. I've been waiting for part two! Thanks.
Great channel!
Awesome..thanx for sharing🖤
I love ALL David The Good videos!
The simplest Terra Preta is human poo inside large pots and charcoal, all tossed into a pit that got filled over time. No turning needed, the other stuff like bones is just extra.
If you can't find enough clay pots, you can make your own terracotta balls. I make them from clay by hand, toss them into the campfire and then have tons of substitute for pots.
How safe could modern human poop be in a garden? (Not a thought I would have had 15 years ago 😂)
@samuelkorger3567 in this context, it is safe if:
- There is a large amount to go thermophillic
- It is deep enough
- It is undisturbed for several years
- This is meant more for perennials and not for annual crops
Got my David the Good gardening cideo fix. Now off to work in my Grocery Row Garden.
The trick to making Amazonian terra preta is to dig a firing pit for your pottery, fire your pottery, smash up the pots that did not turn out right. Then use the pit as a midden and latrine until it is three quarters full, finish it up by dumping river sand and leaves until heaping. Start the next one to replace the pottery from the year before and have all fresh midden/latrine.
There's a 2001 a space odyssey vibe going on here, gotta love it. The talking skull had me laughing, and thinking it's resembling terror preta.
Hop we see you guys in Bali some time for a coffee
Solid follow though on your second Terra Cotta drive. Well balanced, weight shifted through the target and stick drove down the center of the fairway. Lifted up on your first. Keep it up. o/
Love experiments like this
I went full terra pretta nerd too :) I'm using 100yo hand made roof tiles (complete with cool thumb prints!) I tried to get the bits smaller than 1/2", was a bit concerned about sharp edges in my beds when I'm rummaging around in them in future, so I stuck all the broken pottery in a cement mixer for 1/2 hour, worked a treat to take the edges off, I'm also trying different char charges, going with the theory the amazonians were using big pottey shallow dishes the size of molasis/rum dishes to make a form of kimchi over the fire and some cracked which formed the char infused with LAB, so I make charcoal in a 55gal drum on it's side with a 10" slot along the side style (by far the easiest method I've tried for large batches), then quench it with 20 gallons of LAB (and a hose to make sure) some I've put in a plastic kids paddling pool with JS compost to charge it over a few weeks, going to do one batch with the mineral balancing mix when I've worked it out (will need a S. Solomon level mathmatician when my soil test results arrive lol) some I'm cycling thu the thermophillic compost (with added chicken carcasses) I've got 7x 2ft deep beds of loam soil to play with different mixes/charges, I'm in the middle of prepping enough to do it all over this winter, collecting enough wood is a challenge!
I love your beautiful statue of Mary. God bless y’all.
You too - thank you.
I’d be really worried about working in the soil with my hands with shards of pottery. Is that a thing?
If you find a hazard somewhere the safety rule is you either eliminate the hazard or make awareness of it and use some PPE to protect yourself from the hazard.
Thank you
Nice touch with the classical ballet music. 😅 Another great video. I have been "composting in place" all summer.
My soil experiment has been going since picking up the subject of ancient civilizations after many years. Been going since about march last year. I started with some basic potting soil, and some coco peat, then started gathering material from the surrounding area for composting. The parking lot in my building has a large Maple tree, and they are only too happy to be rid of the leaves. Unfortunately living in a city and only having indoor space to work with makes this a real challenge. I found and started breeding worms, and bringing in some biology from the outside and making biochar to add. I have not thrown away soil at all. At this point every time I turn and sift my compost containers to harvest, it just keeps expanding. I haven't been to nursery in months. I then simply add half of one of four 45 liter worm bins, as I rotate through 22 containers (currently).
Tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, lettuce, spring onion, apples, avocado, granadillas, basil, corn, mulberry, and countless brush cherry seedlings. Hopefully I can get some sort of business going. Fingers crossed.
Love your videos mate.
PS. Got my first machete the other day. This is going to be fun.
If you spread small, gravel sized, lumps of dry clay onto your active burn pit they will fire to terracotta. Once clay is fired even to that low level there is a chemical change that is irreversible, *dehydroxylation.* At temperatures above 1800°F (980°C), hydroxyl groups (-OH) begin to break down and release water vapor. This reaction is irreversible, as it leads to a permanent change in the clay's molecular structure. It may help to premix the clay with carbon to create a hybrid terracotta-char particle, this will also cause changes in the iron oxides within the clay and thus have a potential influence on even its magnetism. I don't think this has been empirically researched in modern times!
How often should you turn the terra preta, mix it up?
Love your shirt. Have a tank top just like it!❤
I love these types of experiment, as they can sometimes lead to findings that more rigorous studies can have a harder time picking up on, as they generally try to limit the number of variables, and sometimes interactions are highly complex and involve a high number of variables.
For another perspective, many scientific studies have been done on broken crockery pieces in gardens, and they've failed to show any related improvements, with other approaches towards soil health show much better results. So, breaking crockery and adding the pieces here is almost certainly wasteful, or at least unhelpful and likely misleading, as whatever positive results this approach achieves, those are highly unlikely to be caused in any way by the addition of crockery pieces.
As we are trying to recreate the work of long-dead gardeners, I do not presume to know more than they did, so I am sticking to what has been observed in the soil strata. You may be right, of course!
I like the addition of the broken pots. Not that I understand it either, it's a great concept.
I think an easy substitute for broken pottery could be those baked clay balls made for use in indoor plant pots. Haven't seen people use it yet
I think the pottery shards were from their chamber pots, which did nothing in their own right, but contained plenty of nutrients for the compost.
It is possible
Carpe Terra.... seize the clay...
😂 Verry funny. Unfortunatly terra means earth or land (like terra Scania - land of the Scanians) or terra preta, black earth/soil
What type of bamboo is that in the background? Is that the typical invasive bamboo I see everywhere or is that the building type you're growing?
This is Bambusa multiplex, it's a non-invasive clumping type.
Only component that seems of dubious value is the 'pot shards'. If nothing else it tells future archeologists that this is hominin made soil. 😉
I eagerly await your results! I was surprised to learn that things like carbon foam are some of the best for capturing energy from the atmosphere(far better than say tinfoil)...I suspect thats a big part of its function in the soil. They've also made exceptional batteries from soil and microbes, so there is an obvious connection.
Maybe near the dense villages there were veritable mountains of used chamber pots, chamber pot contents and infant/female swaddling.
Enjoy your vid. Nice t-shirt
I really like that t-shirt
I love the talking pig head!
compost everything!!!!!
I have a question. I have 600 or 700 paper back books can I add them to my compost bids?
I probably would, though I'd take off the glossy covers.
Pottery for water retention?
I listened to a French professor who thought that the indigenous people went to Venezuela to take easily accessible crude oil to leave the biochar soaked. This was how he loaded the biochar
What would be the supposed benefit in soaking in crude oil?
Would you mind telling me the French professor's name ?
Pls
@@williambrown9341 Konrad SCHREIBER
@@williambrown9341 th-cam.com/video/BLPFlcSbjAc/w-d-xo.html 1:10 I talk about that in french
There may be an ingredient that you are leaving out that might help considerably. I know you are familiar with the Chinampas of Mexico. Their key ingredient for their soil is the silt from the rivers and canals. It is said that even today their soil will hold enough moisture to feed a seed for a month before it needs to be watered again. Maybe you have added it and I missed it. Sorry if that is the case.
You could fire clay pieces at the same time as you make bio char?
Did you add additional fungi? 🍄
Excess nitrogen from carcases helps break down the cellulose of the woody debris and goes especially well when you add mushrooms and mushroom compost.
Moulding down fallen leaves also 👍
They actually sell a ceramic soil mix additive. Its called a ceramic clay pebble for aquaponics. I believe it would basically do the same sort of thing as broken pottery. Of course there is always a cost with an additive.
You should try some earthen fired pottery, use some local clay. Mabye fire it when your making your next round of bio char? You would have to harvest more river clay.... get those 11 kid to work ;)
Are there any local roofing companies that have to dispose of broken tiles?
❤❤❤
Can we replay the classic refrain again at the end of another video?
"Be good to your mother, and always say please, be loyal to friends, and compost your enemies!"
Sorry if I got any of it wrong. Thanks!
Dig along a river in the dry season. Go as deep as you can and use the dirt to build walls. Make a water gate in the walls! Fill with dry brush and other things. when the rains begin, burn it off and open the water gate to drown the fire. When the river crests, close the gate to save fire and silt. By next dry season, do it again, then again planting crops early in the dry season, harvest, add brush. Burn. Flood.
How do I get one of those t-shirts, Compost your enemies?
They are here: www.aardvarktees.com/collections/the-survival-gardener
I think that the bits of pottery were part of a chamber pots. Using all the waste of the residents of the community
I was thinking you were gonna dress like an amazon native and break the pottery and dance around it. 😂😂😂😂😂
That's too much😂
I wonder about the use of burning the bones in the terra preta. I can see how bone meal can add useful calcium, phosphorus, and magnesium to soil, but does the fire really help break down the bone? Sure the fire can convert weeds and wood to charcoal and potash and cook meat scraps, but aren't the bones the same as they were before you threw them in the fire? They don't seem to burn. How is bone that's been in fire any better than regular or ground up bone?
Take a kiln cooked clay brick and put it in a tray with an inch of water. In the right conditions it will wick until the brick is wet throughout. That is the reason for the terracotta’s in soil
I saw a TH-cam video about it, they stacked chunks of pottery on top of each other, wet the bottom, and it wicked all the way up to the top of the pilr
Are Terra Preta just remnants of a huge fire calamity that swept through the Amazon? Then survivors grew on top of it? It's been described as a layer over everything a few feet under the topsoil. The world has had a few major catastrophes, the Younger Dryas 12k years ago and that flooding event 6k years ago. How well does the Terra Preta align with either of those events?
I hope you're doing okay. Mother nature's got us.
That hurt me Sooo bad that you smashed those pots. I Love terra cota pots.
They were all cracked so don't feel too bad
🇺🇸🙋♀️ That's not the usual statue style of Mother Mary at the end , so Im wondering what Saint that was? Loved the Bible verse! ❤️🙏
I'll check out the garden link.
It is Mary, holding the rosary. Thank you.
@@davidthegood .. Ohh very nice! Would love to see her whole statue next time.
I seriously seriously seriously doubt that the broken pottery has anything to do with fertility.
So, I think you pretty much nailed it by calling it a cargo cult style imitation
All the arrows point to the components of terra preta being things that retain nutrients in rainy environments where they will otherwise leach out. Those same soils tend to be acidic because the available calcium has gone bye-bye with the rainfall. In these environments (maritime, tropics), anything that returns calcium to the soil (hello, bones) and then helps it stay there (biochar) is good. But, more to the point, even if they started getting built up as a trash pile, I think humans were smart enough to recognize the fertility and start to do it on purpose as a cultural solution to multiple problems.
Has anyone wondered if the methods used to make pottery in South America back then varied in any way possibly making the outcome different? Maybe?
How do you keep your dog(s) out of those bones?
She takes some of them
i know for a fact Biochar at 10% works, here in Australia with dry soil, similar climate and rain to you DTG, i dug biochar 1 foot deep ( 30cm for the rest of the world ) , and planted an apple tree, i also planted 10 apples trees nearby but in less dug soil, the biochar tree grew faster and more branches than the other 10 trees, all trees got compost and chop n drop mulch, but no tera preta, i now put 10% biochar and 1 unburnt cow/sheep leg bone in all pots, and several chickenbones ( chicken bones break down in 2 years i seems, cow/sheep last longer ). i am yet to experiment with burnt bones,
Sir! Check out Gary’s Gardening channel , he runs a nursery in SoCal, talks about the *duff* _dead stuff_ layer - and share my hack! I’m using a good old toaster oven and left over chilli cans (and now a left over rice cooker pot after the rice cooker broke) , filling it with bones and food scraps and covering it with aluminum foil and running it on max temp overnight. Semi-Instant terra preta! Instead of hundreds of years, it takes about 12 hours 😊
Sounds like fun.
How healthy would you say the chickens that were put in?
Factory chickens, so not great.
My theory on the tera cotta is that it provides aeration!
Poop
Terra preta might have been night soil treatment and other organic waste disposal pits.
Varieties of aromatic woods burnt atop to mask the smell and clay pottery shards that required disposal doubling as additional odour control
It is quite possible.
"particularly because our technological society has done some really, REALLY dumb things..." David
I wonder if this would work on a patch of stony badlands in the high desert. Maybe gardening there isn't the best idea.
I would totally try!
When I was living in Costa Rica I saw old pottery shards all over the country, in the north and way down near Panama. Apparently the indigenous people broke a lot of brown clay pots and just left the pieces. Perhaps terra preta seems to have a lot of pottery shards just because the people who used the pottery broke it a lot. I got the impression that the jars or pots were of low quality, maybe "fired" next to the cooking fire. Anyway I wonder if they put the shards in the terra preta intentionally or incidentally.
Also Costa Rica has a lot of black soil that hasn't been modified by people. It's just volcanic dark soil. But there's a lot of clay there too, a lot like Georgia clay. The mix is pretty fertile.
Make sure you add plenty of microbes. Especially mycorrhizal fungi and beneficial bacteria.
I want that shirt! 👚
This is the link - a family business makes them: www.aardvarktees.com/collections/vendors?q=The%20Survival%20Gardener
i think your missing some key points ^^ back then they would have thrown everything they didn't want into that pile. can you imagine what that would have smelled like while it was fermenting like a giant Bokashi pit! spent grains old clothing you name it.
❤
You just created a pile that could have been left behind by a deluge or mud flood. The collapse of a Vapor canopy would be a possibility. Silt happens…❤
The only concern I have with charcoal or Biochar based soils is it appears that they will turn Mycorrhizae Fungi into a pathogen.
wouldn't the pores in the terracotta act in exactly the same way as the pores in the the charcoal?
Ask a local high school art department for pottery scraps. My wife teaches high school sculpture and is teeming with this stuff.
I discovered a slightly less ancient Terra Preta in my yard while digging out a new garden bed a couple weeks ago. I found plates and cups and Ball canning jars with zinc lids that were made in the 1890's. I also found a bunch of 6" square nails that are in near perfect condition and several horeshoe nails that weren't in good condition.
Damn what is that outro song?
th-cam.com/video/P2bVnUwA8sQ/w-d-xo.html
❤👍🙏💥
Never heard of Terra Pretax.