Interestingly, I came home from giving a talk on The Cycle of Life and
Death in a Permaculture System to the Local Bioregional Permaculture
Group and found this post.
The wood ash in the compost was one thing that came up and I had to go
on the side of only small amounts. I wish I had the post four hours
earlier.
Are you able to direct me to the actual text of this?
Gil
bdnow wrote:
Hey Allan,
No, I have been pretty busy and only loosely following
things. I only opened your e-mail because of the
subject line (I didn't realize it was to me and not
the list).
Yes, there is something to ashes. In a rodale study
(that was never published and I found buried in some
archives), they made a buch of compost piles with
different amendments, including rock phosphates,
Pfeiffer starter, wood ash and a few other things.
They noted that no pile finished any earlier than the
others, but didn't make much mention of the final NPK
analyses, which were rather remarkable. Most of the
piles hovered around 1-1-1 to 2-2-2, BUT the Pfeiffer
pile was like 1-2-10 (nothing strange about 10, eh?)
and the wood ash pile was like 1-6-2. So lets back up
here...the piles with added Rock phosphate were barely
up from the rest while the pile with the added K (wood
ash) had soaring P and the pile with added critters
and preps (you might think N) had a soaring K [note: A
Biodynamic Book of Moons - my favorite for the
alchemic notation - places K as the Sal or BD500
nutrient element (makes roots and heavy stalks and
such)and P as the sulph or fire element].
So it seems that the ash somehow stimulates the fire
element. This is also seen if you put some freshly
burned wood ash on hot peppers or tomatoes - the ripen
quickly and thoroughly and the peppers are searing
like coals.
On a more mundane level, all of those nutrients,
mostly mineral elements, are rapidly realeased to the
soils as soluble salts rather than their slow
mineralization through biotic/humic channels.
Cheers,
Chris
Chris goes on:
I imagine that the issue is like any other -
unshakeable doctrine is foolish and there may be
reasons to do things like slash and burn sometimes. A
fire brings new life to a forest at the same time that
is destroys old life.
The issue of whether burned things (ash) are good for
the soil is pretty straight forward - yes, generally,
unless you have a salinity or alkalinity problem).
Whether or not to slash and burn versus just applying
wood ash is another. My immediate intuition is that
it is probably a good thing once in awhile, if not
more often. Of course you would want to do something
to perk the microbes back up after the cooking, but it
shouldn't be hard.
As far as the Rodale study, they seemed to do
everything pretty much by the book - the main
ingredients were all from the same big piles, the only
difference being the extra amendments added. They
seemed to be pretty sciency folks from the way it
read. I sure wish I could find the thing, but I have
looked and do not have it.
Chris Shade
