Chicken-bone biochar
Chicken bones have been a problem on our farm for years. I like to stew them up to make delicious broth,
but after that, the bones are too brittle to be safely fed to
Lucy. And if we put the bones anywhere except deep
underground...Lucy finds them! Some weeks, I'd decide not to cook
one of our delicious homegrown chickens because I didn't want to deal
with the bones.
But I recently saw on two different blogs where homesteaders were putting their chicken bones in the fire to make biochar.
Great idea! It turns out that if I throw the wet mass of bones
onto a strong fire in our wood stove just before it's time to damp it
down, the bones quickly turn into a crumbly form that I suspect will
have many of the benefits of biochar (with none of the succulent smell
that attracts Lucy). We always sift our wood-stove ashes to
salvage the charcoal for the garden, so the bone char will be put to
good use.
The solution is so
simple, I can't figure out why I didn't think of it before! I
guess I'd better thaw out one of those chickens in the freezer....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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