Biochar Expo Oct 28

Our annual Biochar Expo will be October 28 at 10 am at the Westside Community Garden. This is behind the First United Methodist Church on Harvard St. The Expo will be concurrent with the Umpqua Valley Farmer’s Market in the church parking lot. I would recommend accessing the Expo near Fremont Junior High, 850 W Keady Ct. to unload equipment. There will be signs! There is also plenty of parking off Keady Ct.

There is a little dry cordwood and wood chips there. If you have some dry feedstock please bring it.

Being in the city limits we have to keep it small. I will bring a 30 gal TLUD and the Weber barbecue. A small Oregon kiln would be appropriate if someone has one. There is water available.

We will leave the char we make at the garden for the gardeners to use. This will be the start of a long term (600 years?) soils demonstration.

There are lunch opportunities at the Farmer’s Market.

I have notified Master Gardeners of Lane and Douglas Counties. Also with the recent publicity this could be well attended. The weather looks good.

Great article on Drew Biochar

The Roseburg News Review published a nice story on our project:
http://www.nrtoday.com/news/environment/logging-slash-becomes-biochar-for-local-farms/article_617d4ead-272b-54e6-a714-263b56555a01.html

All Systems Go for Drew Biochar Project

If you have been thinking about coming up to help out with the biochar project outside of Drew, Oregon, we want you to know that we are still on for October 16. Some of us will arrive at the site on Sunday, October 15. We will camp out there that night so we are ready to start lighting piles and loading kilns in the morning.

We welcome your help, but ask you to please register here: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3446841/Smoke-Into-Biochar

See the post below for details on how to get to the site. If you camp on the site, you need to be completely self-sufficient and bring your own food, water, and camping gear. The site is pretty rough with no developed camp sites.

We are looking forward to a productive couple of days, making as much biochar as we can from the material on the site. We will be tracking labor inputs and biochar outputs so we can better understand the economics of this work.