The EssentiaList

by Catherine Haug, July 10 , 2011

I have a small wood stove and an old fashioned briquette barbecue, both of which generate ash. In the past I added this to my heavy-duty yard waste (twigs, branches and fir cones) to become part of the compost. But is this the best thing to do? Can ash be added to regular compost? Are there undesirable contaminants in briquette ash? What about ash from burning paper?

As a chemist, I understand that ash is high in mineral content, and as such, is quite alkaline. In fact, wood ash mixed with water produces lye (sodium hydroxide, NaOH) or potash (potassium hydroxide, KOH) which are used for soap making (and also to preserve cod fish as lutefisk, but I digress). If this is made a part of garden compost, can it be bad for the flowers and veggies?

Topics discussed in this article:

• wood ash in compost and garden;
• biochar;
• other uses for wood ash;
• briquette ash.

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by Catherine Haug

Some time ago I posted an article What Makes your Compost Tick? which explores the science behind the optimum conditions for making compost. I drew largely from the book The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, but the principles also apply for composting without human waste.

Our current ‘sanitary’ methods of dealing with human waste (community sewer treatment systems or septic systems) are vastly inferior to composting our waste, in part because of the amount of energy required to run and maintain the systems. And they don’t do a good job of eliminating pathogens and pharmaceuticals, resulting in ground water pollution.

Composting the waste, on the other hand, is 100% natural and requires only human energy to create and compost the waste. And when done properly, will eliminate all pathogens and break down many pharmaceuticals.

For another take on composting human waste, check out Your Crap, Our Compost: Turning Human Feces into Fertile Soil by Nance Klehm, from alternet.org. From the article:

“A generally fecal-phobic society reacts to the thought with a mix of snickering interest and fearful aversion, all dispatched in a single flush. But Nance Klehm, 43-year-old urban forager and grower, transforms human excrement into nutritious soil one bucket at a time. … ‘I’m not treating it chemically. I trust microorganisms to do it for me,”’Klehm says.”

This system is NOT a composting toilet, which uses chemicals and does not fully compost the waste.  You can make your own toilet and compost bin with found materials.

If anyone is interested in this technique, you can check out my copy of The Humanure Handbook; just send me a note to cat(at)essentialstuff.org. Or peek inside the book on Amazon: Humanure Handbook.