[Terrapreta] VM composition

[Richard Haard]

hi

Still waiting for the results to come in on our tests. It's only  
money and is darned interesting. Will report for your comments.

I'm wondering now what good charcoal is in terms of VM and use in  
soil. My understanding that the slash and char strategy in moist  
tropics was low temperature of formation and that this embedded VM  
could be considered substrate for colonizing organisms? In addition,  
reading articles on the beneficial properties for plants of wood  
vinegar - apparently a water soluble component of smoke that  
smoldering combustion included this material and perhaps we should be  
pretreating our char with this before use.

Rich H
On Jun 7, 2007, at 8:30 PM, Tom Miles wrote:

> Kevin,
>
> Earlier this year after a similar discussion with Michael we  
> pointed out the
> need to characterize VM in the charcoals while measuring other soil  
> and
> plant performance indicators. Richard Haard is doing this for his  
> trials. I
> don't know what other organizations are doing.
>
> Tom