Starting the biochar grind

Hey all! Hope you got a chance to spend some time outside this week. This narrow window between the weather getting warm and the biting insects waking up is one of my favorite times of the year.

This Week in the Commons

The big project this week was figuring out how to crush up the ~700 pounds of biochar that we made during this year's sugarbush. Technically you can get most of the garden benefits of biochar even if you leave it in larger chunks, but there are a few reasons I like to get it smaller:

Smaller particles mean more surface area, which means better adsorption capacity and more homes for beneficial microbes.
Smaller particles make for more nicely-textured garden soil, don't get in the way of carrots and other root veggies, and help create good soil tilth.
Smaller particles can be more easily suspended in a mixture of compost tea, which can then be poured directly into vole tunnels for a combination of efficient below-ground biochar distribution and satisfying revenge against the little root-eating varmints 😼

Eventually, I hope to get a proper hammermill, which would be able to quickly and efficiently grind the biochar into small particles. But that's going to need to wait until we have a workshop building with electricity out at Treespeaker. In the meantime, this year's experiment involves a cement mixer:

Biochar comes out of the kiln in pieces that are around 1/2"-2" big. I've been loading that biochar into the cement mixer, along with some 3"-5" river rocks and a chunk of log that seemed like an appropriate size. Then I let the cement mixer run for half an hour or so. The rocks and log tumble around inside and smash up the char. Then I empty the char out and sift it.

Anything bigger than 1/4" goes back into the cement mixer for more smashing. Anything between 1/4" and 1/8" gets set aside for use in pee buckets. (I'll do a whole write-up on those at some point, but the short version is that urine is full of nitrogen that's good for the garden, and by peeing into a bucket of charcoal, you eliminate the smell factor that can make urine collection unpleasant.) Anything smaller than 1/8" is ready to be mixed with compost and used as biochar.

I'm still fine-tuning the process, but so far I'm pretty happy with the results I'm getting from the cement mixer system. It's not as fast as a hammermill would be, but it's a lot easier on my arms than the previous system of smashing it by hand with a gravel tamper. We're on track to have biochar available for sale at the Artisan Market when we open next week.

Speaking of which, we also made some progress on the Artisan Market cabin. We'll be starting out with 38 baskets for sale, as well as Tshirts, stickers, dog toys, and more. I need to make some pricing signs, and I'm hoping to get down there this week for a little more setup and sprucing, but it's nice to know that even if that doesn't happen, we've got the basics ready for opening day.

The most obvious goal of our Artisan Market booth is to raise some money so that we can expand the projects we do here in town without Nate and I spending too much out-of-pocket. But I also want to use it for some experiments in collaborative economics, and I took some steps this week to get started on one of those. I'm keeping it slightly secret until it's closer to ready, so consider this a teaser of something yet to come 🤫 If you're curious, you can probably get more info out of me in person, because I'm terrible at keeping secrets that I'm excited about.

Coming Up Next Week

Tuesday, 5-7pm @ White Lake Community Library - Common Ground is hosting a panel discussion about how federal funding cuts are likely to affect the White Lake area. We'll have panelists from the Disability community, local food programs, the library, and the local schools.
Tuesday is also election day! If you're in Muskegon country, you'll have the opportunity to vote for the county museum millage, which keeps county museums free for all county residents. Voting in small municipal elections is also a good way to national-level representatives to take your letters/phone calls more seriously. They run your name against the voter database, and the more often you vote, the more they have to care about your opinion.
Friday, noon @ the Weathervane is our weekly Dance For Democracy protest! We had sixty or seventy people out last week as part of the #MayDay day of action! Now that the weather is so nice, it's a fun way to meet other local progressives and get connected to movement work in the area.
Saturday, 9am-2pm @ the Artisan Market is the opening day of the Artisan Market! You know you'll need a good basket to carry home all your fresh produce from the farmer's market, and we've got the best baskets in town. Plus Tshirts, stickers, and more. Nearly everything we sell is one-of-a-kind, so don't wait until later in the season or the tourists might have walked off with the best stuff.

Solidarity Steps

Hopefully, none of us will ever face a situation where someone else is in danger of bleeding out. But we live in a world with a lot of guns, cars, and chainsaws, so it's not a bad idea to know how to respond if you're on the scene of a life-threatening bleeding injury. Stop The Bleed offers specialized first aid courses that teach you how to provide emergency first aid for severe bleeding injuries. They even have a free online training that only takes half an hour or so, and teaches you the basics of how to apply pressure, pack a wound, or use a tourniquet safely. I try to run through the online training every couple of years so that the info will be fresh in my mind if I ever need it.

Recommendation Corner

This week's recommendation is Fiyah Magazine. If you like sci fi and fantasy stories, Fiyah is a great place to find up-and-coming writers who aren't getting the Oprah's Book Club marketing treatment. They focus on writers from across the African diaspora, and I've found so many great books through them that I never would have heard of otherwise. They also organize the Ignyte Awards every year, and the nominations lists for past years is an absolute treasure trove of great speculative and visionary fiction.

This Week's ~~Nails~~ Art Piece

I haven't done my nails yet this week because the weather is too nice and I want to go play outside once I'm done with the newsletter, so instead you get to see an art piece that I've been working on sporadically for nearly a year and finally finished. It's painted on a Remo hand drum, and it's an attempt to visually convey an observation I keep having about our society. Our culture is set up to teach us that we should be trying to work our way to the center of things, but the center is empty, boring, and competitive. The cooperative edges, where no one is trying to get ahead of anyone else, are where you find the vibrancy and life.