Bunny Guinness from the Telegraph: We’re nation of weather watchers, and the gardeners among us are getting extremely concerned. Even if we get a drenching this month, the hosepipe ban in many areas looks set to stay for the summer. It’s time for a rethink about the way we use water in the garden.

By Penny Stine:
Gardening may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean that gardening methods, tools or ideas are equally aged.

Although it’s possible to grow a garden using the same practices used by your dear old granny, new research, new ideas and new discoveries may make it possible to grow more of what you want without moving to Iowa for the sake of growing better sweet corn.

Researchers and enthusiasts alike are singing the praises of biochar, a type of charcoal that’s produced when biomass is burned without oxygen.

Via Cordis Wire:
The multi-talented biochar is one of the world's fastest growing research topics. The 1st International Biochar Summer School “bio:char crossroads”, September 9 to 16, Potsdam 2012, offers excellent young scientists from around the world a valuable means of information exchange and professional development.

I concluded that I wanted a fast method, that could burn green freshly cut branches from hedge trimming and scrub clearning in the garden. It needed to be simple and not produce excessive smoke. It also needed to be able to deal with relatively large quantities at once. I wasn't concerned about getting the maximum possible weight of biochar from the waste material burnt, instead I sacrificed a small amount of yield for ease of operation and clean burning.

The top down Fast Furnace way
The counter-intuitive method I settled on basically consists of filling a drum with close packed branches and twigs. The drum has an open top and bottom and is supported a few inches off the ground by three sturdy blocks of wood. The drum itself has large air holes cut into it two thirds of the way up the side - mine are triangular, but only because that was easiest to cut with the jig saw at the time.

In this video, KVIE profiles Jules Dervaes, a man who has turned his small suburban yard into a profitable organic farm. Dervaes says what started out as a hobby became serious for him with the advent of genetically modified foods and rising food prices.
With the help of his family, they now produce over 6,000 pounds of food annually on their 1/10-acre land, though their goal is to hit 10,000 pounds. The 350 varieties of organic fruits and vegetables grown not only sustain the Dervaes family, but the large surplus is sold to local restaurants and catering companies.
Setting an example as to what's possible in city farming and sustainability, the Dervaes family even makes their own bio-fuel for their minimal vehicle usage. Huffington Post

"Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future” Uploader Website Dailymotion

Peter Hirst brought his 70 gallon stainless steel biochar retort to Warner, NH and showed us how to burn 100 pounds of wood into 30 pounds of biochar. That's enough for a few beds in our garden after we grind it up and mix it with an equal amount of compost to innoculate the biochar with soil bacteria. But the biochar pioneers are scrambling to find economical and efficient furnaces that can produce tons of the material.
Biochar was first discovered by Amazonian Indian societies a thousand years ago (terra preta), and rediscovered a decade or so ago by modern cultures desperate for ways to improve soil fertility. The new biochar retorts, such as this one that Peter demonstrates, burn biomass with high efficiency and also produce charcoal which can be added to soils, sequestering that carbon more or less permanently. The secret is wood gasification. For more curiously local perspectives, visit http://curiouslylocal.com