Kuntan, Composting and Carbon Sequestration
Hiroko Tabuchi keeps a compost pile in her living room. Most of us associate compost with noxious smells and flying insects. Even the most avid gardeners would recoil from active composting inside their home. Hiroko’s secret? An approach popular in Japan, based on Kuntan, a agricultural ash product, which enhances the effectiveness of compost and eliminates odors.
In her NYTimes article, The Compost by My Couch she describes an odorless process that uses food scraps, woody material and a product very similar to biochar.
Biochar is woody material which has undergone pyrolysis, which is essentially a type of charcoal. The biomass ends up as a stable, solid from of carbon that absorbs smells, increases microbial action, sequesters carbon, improves drought resistance in plants and assists in composting.
Good compost comes from a combination of Nitrogen rich material (most food scraps), Carbon rich material (such as coco husks, sawdust, wood chips) , time and moisture.
Biochar speeds the process up, three ways:
1) Microbial Homes: because of its physical characteristics, biochar has little pockets that offer the microbes places to live.
2) Water and Air: Again, because biochar often looks like a coral reef or a honeycomb, it provides pockets of air and is hydrophilic, retaining moisture even when it feels dry, that is accessible to the bacteria doing the composting.
3) A Chemical Catalyst: Finally, at the subatomic level, briefly described in Biochar and Soil Health, biochar provides the microbes the opportunity to add or subtract electrons, which speeds up their activity.
The process described by Hiroko can process 1.5 lbs of fruits or vegetable scraps per day, and requires:
Any large cardboard box — not plastic or metal, which won’t let the compost breathe. The bottom should be reinforced with an extra layer of cardboard.
Putting the box on bricks or blocks further improves air flow.
She recommends roughly three parts carbon to two parts ash.
She covers the box with a towel
In the NY Times, she also shared the instructions which are in Japanese, but you might find the illustrations helpful.
We now offer raw biochar for composting. SymSoil uses biochar extensively, and has done a lot of work finding the best quality versions of biochar. We are selling 2.5 lb bags for use in home composters here. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can pick them up at our Fairfield location any Thursday.
Not everyone wants compost in their living room. The Local Carbon Network strongly recommends the Jora compost tumbler, which is superior to other composters on the market.
SymSoil is the fulfillment arm of the Local Carbon Network outside of the San Francisco Bay Area. LCN’s goal is to help families sequester 1 ton of carbon per year, using their household food scraps.
Join us by being an early adopter in your community. Learn more here at Your Local Carbon Network.
The insulated steel tumbler maintains high composting temperatures with relatively small amounts of organic material. It is also resistant to outdoor weather — you can compost food scraps with ease, even mid-winter with snow on the ground! It is easy to tumble and resistant to pests.
With a cardboard box, a Jora tumbler or any other composting equipment, biochar will improve composting results.
Join us by being an early adopter in your community. Learn more here at Your Local Carbon Network. or reach out to us at: Info@SymSoil.com
We will write more in the near future about carbon sequestration, compost and biochar.
SymSoil has products to help farmers improve profitability and to help gardeners grow more flavorful, healthy foods. Our products help you reseed the complete soil microbe biome, provide conditioners and foods for soil microbes, consulting and laboratory testing to assess the soil biology and plant nutrient cycling.
Talk to us about your garden or farm to learn more. SymSoil was named one of 2019’s AgTech Companies to Watch. Accredited Investors can learn more about SymSoil as an impact investment here.
