Welcome!
This is a weekly blog with a fun vibe that often veers off gardening, so stop by and join the conversation. We are here every Saturday at 9AM Eastern with new content and chit chat continuing throughout the week.
As gardeners we’ve all seen it. A healthy vegetable, fruit tree or berry bush suddenly struck down by fungal disease.
Black spot on my cherry tree (2024)
Every gardener wants to do something. The usual advice? Get something that kills it. Conventional farmers and gardeners use increasingly toxic sprays, killing not only the fungus causing the problem, but most other microbes and fungi.
Weeds? Kill ‘em with herbicides. Bugs? Kill ‘em with insecticides. Fungus and bacteria? Kill ‘em with fungicides, copper or sulfur sprays. If they come back, kill ‘em with some other chemical. And the result? Superbugs immune to nearly everything. Pathogenic fungi shrugging off whatever you spray. Weeds that survive Round-up so they invent genetically enhanced crops to tolerate increasing amounts of poisons.
“Round-up Ready” seeds appear in every conventional farm seed catalog.
I have dug into conventionally farmed soils and seen no earthworms, no tiny spiders, no insects, no molds or signs of life other than the crop in that field. And maybe not so oddly, I have seen chemically doused, genetically amended kernels of corn lying weeks on the ground, untouched by bugs, birds or even decay. Deer avoid those fields.
And I’ve seen deer nibble anything.
Animals can sense that “food” grown this way is actually dangerous. So they don’t eat it. Only domesticated animals fenced in with no alternative except starvation eat it.
Conventional agriculture: Monoculture as far as the eye can see
Our stores are full of “food” grown this way. Organic food costs more, if you can get it. Glyphosate has been banned in Europe, for good reasons. It binds to minerals like manganese, zinc and calcium—depriving plants (and us!) of these vital nutrients. Manganese deficiency reduces disease resistance. Zinc deficiency impairs photosynthesis and sends out stress responses that attract insects and fungus looking for vulnerable plants. Calcium depletion causes all sorts of issues, including blossom end rot on our beloved tomatoes. Studies have shown beneficial microbes are less than half usual levels in glyphosate sprayed soil, even long after application. Pathogenic fungi increase up to threefold the level in control soil samples.
And we wonder why we feel sick so often.
Celiac disease and even some cancers have been attributed to Round-up, and that’s only one of the many herbicides, insecticides and fungicides sprayed routinely on our “food” supply. Farm state Iowa has moved from middle of the list for cancer cases among younger people 60 years ago to nearly the top, reports the Washington Post (Oct 27). The chief six corn producing states now have cancer rates 5% above the national average.
How can we sustain life from the soil if we don’t cultivate life in the soil, especially beneficial life that actually contributes to plant health and, not so incidentally, ours?
If we are what we eat, killing everything by poisoning everything sure doesn’t seem the intelligent way to go. But looking around at how we’re poisoning the land, air and water with fossil fuel derived plastics, chemicals and wastes like methane, benzine and carbon dioxide, that we deliberately put poisons on our foods isn’t surprising.
There has to be a better way.
And there is.
Research has increasingly shown that plants and microbial lifeforms mutually nourish each other. Earthworms thrive when microbes are abundant, and earthworms are some of the best “farmers” alive. Mycorrhiza, fungal fibers which grow in association with the roots of a plant, forms a symbiotic relationship, helping a plant grow and access what it needs from the soil while the plant feeds the fungus. Some plants like clover fix nitrogen, which feeds other plants.
The trick is how to nourish an environment in your garden or farm that promotes instead of prohibits this “web of life.”
Our Experience
My wife and I have been working to get our farm functioning in a regenerative, organic, sustainable (low carbon) manner for the last decade. It’s been a challenge.
Touring the farm in sunny mid-September
In the far Pacific Northwest, La Niña weather brings unusually wet winters and springs. Fungus loves long slow rains and temperatures in the fifties or sixties. Sunshine tends to kill it. So if instead of passing showers followed by breaks of sunshine (normal in April and May) we get long, steady rain with fairly warm temperatures, that is when fungus, particularly the pathogenic ones causing Black Spot, Brown Rot and Peach Leaf Curl, explode.
These fungi weaken fruit trees, bringing on not just reduced blooming and fruit set, but bug attacks.
After a record three long years of La Niña, my fruit trees in 2024 had had enough. Six out of 120 died. Twelve peach trees dropped all fruit except four peaches. One cherry tree lost all leaves by mid-August and the fruit was low quality (pictured at top). A mature pear tree bore five pears, with several others giving us none at all. Fourteen apricot trees gave us one apricot, and six died outright.
We tried the usual organic approach—copper sprays to stunt the fungus and sulfur sprays to kill them (and nearly everything else). We tried compost alone and commercial organic fertilizers. We tried a bacillus spray, but at $75 a gallon, we couldn’t afford much.
We researched biochar, and found that to hold a lot of promise. But we also planned to use it with as much bacillus and other products like EM-1 as we could afford.
First, let’s look at biochar alone, then what bacillus adds.
Biochar is not charcoal. Charcoal is wood burnt in a low oxygen environment at approximately 400 degrees F. It is smothered out, leaving volatiles behind so it can be relit. Char for biochar is burnt in a kiln that has a low oxygen environment at the bottom of the kiln, but which pumps oxygen to the top of the kiln, making the fire burn from the top down instead of bottom up. The volatiles are completely burnt out in a “flame top” kiln that uses a double-sided wall to draw oxygen up to the top, as shown in the pic below. The pic at the top of the article shows one side is about 6 inches above ground level while the inner side is sealed with dirt. Heat draws oxygen up the sides (the inner wall is about 600 degrees while the outer wall stays under 200 degrees).
Smoke shows the oxygen flow—note curling smoke from airflow
The wood reaches about 800 degrees. You stoke the initial flames with smaller branches until you have a bed of hot coals, then add larger and larger pieces. About three hours in and when the coals fill nearly half way up the sides, you stop adding wood and let it burn for another two hours or so—don’t worry, it won’t go to ash—then quench it with water, which “shocks” the hot coals, creating a nearly “exploded clay” effect, leaving a porous, light, nearly 100% carbon char. And that char locks up carbon for hundreds of years (look up Terra Preta on Wikipedia and the Ring of Fire Kiln, or Biochar Handbook by Kelpie Wilson).
One gram of char has the surface area of a soccer field. This holds an immense amount of water, and forms an environment highly conducive to housing for beneficial microbes, once it is “bio-charged.” Biocharging can be done by mixing with compost. This method allows bacteria and “good” fungi to populate the char. This product is then either tilled into the soil or top dressed around plants—e.g. fruit trees and bushes.
Plants love the stuff. Pathogenic fungi appear to thrive in decay and rot. But this char doesn’t rot. The moisture it holds and slowly releases and its near absence of decaying matter appears to be the ideal medium for beneficial bacteria and fungi. Biochar alone helps immensely to improve the health of plants, and it also allows you to cut your watering (irrigation) roughly in half—saving money for folks who get their water metered out. But it also saves energy for those with unmetered wells—pumps use a lot of power. Further, the next year you can renew the biochar by adding compost alone (remember, the char stays there). But studies have shown that adding a little char to the compost continues to boost yields 5% or more annually.
Note the bees. Char not crushed or added to compost yet.
We are now super-charging the bio-part of biochar by spraying it liberally with bacillus, but in a much less costly form of this beneficial bacteria. Barngrown.com (I don’t own stock in this startup company) has developed a much cheaper means of producing sprays suffused with beneficial strains of the bacterium bacillus. Instead of about $75 a gallon, they sell theirs for $25 a gallon. If you buy a tote full (250 gallons), the cost drops to about $5 a gallon.
So what do you get with biochar (char mixed with compost) sprayed with Winnie (the name of the product—Winnie from poo instead of Winnie the poo)? This is where I update what I told you back in late June about biochar and bacillus. Instead of four peaches from 12 trees, we harvested 130 pounds of peaches. Instead of five medium sized pears, we got nearly 80 pounds of giants. And both harvests came after extensive thinning of the fruit which set very heavily.
Our vegetables reached record size for us and continued to bear way past the usual season. We were harvesting yellow squash and zuchinni into early October.
Tote of Winnie is in the background, huge European pears in the foreground
The Bramley apples (not shown) were larger than softballs. This photo from mid-September.
We picked raspberries November 4th.
Winter squash and pumpkins
I could go on, but this Saturday Morning Garden blog is already too long. But one last thing about biochar.
We did leave two trees unsprayed with Winnie and not biocharred this year until very late in the season, as controls. The unsprayed peach tree looked awful but it gave us a dozen or so medium sized peaches with low brix, unlike the sprayed and biocharred trees.
Our little sour cherry which looked fine the same year one of the sweet cherries looked like it would die, lost nearly all leaves this year due to black spot. It only began to recover when we sprayed it late in August, figuring the point was made.
Sick sour cherry tree (should be full of leaves)
And the cherry tree that we thought might die after it lost all its leaves by early August last year? Here it is (foreground) at the start of August. It held its leaves right up to the end of September.
Cherry tree we thought would die
That tree in the photo was the one we spread biochar on first last fall, at a 50-50 mixture char to compost, out to the dripline. Then we foliar sprayed it three times with the bacillus spray and sprayed the char on the ground as well during 2025.
The asparagus which was planted as seeds in biochar enriched/bacillus sprayed soil in March was still shooting up new spears in late September and into October (photo taken 24 September). Compare the one in July from the SMGB I wrote then—it will be on the SMG blogs published in the group list.
Asparagus in late September, seeded in March
We’re still getting figs today (less than a mile from Canada!) in our hoophouse (high tunnel).
Yes, that’s ginger on the right, tomatoes on the left, and figs down the center
And one final thing we learned in our battle against pathogenic fungi; in a band about 40 miles wide running from Vancouver Canada to down below Portland, a band with typically wet warm winters and consequent fungal problems—do not prune your fruit trees during the winter as done in other places with very different winter weather. Prune them after the fruit comes off in summer. Our hot, dry summers prompt fruit trees to go into a quasi-dormancy until rain starts again in September or so. Pruning in our warm wet winter opens them up for fungal infection and Black Knot and cankers.
I pruned my trees after fruit drop in August and early September and then foliar sprayed them with the bacillus spray.
They started blooming and putting on new growth again.
Hardy kiwi putting on new growth even while leaves were falling off in late October
As you read this I’ll be preparing grapes for dehydrating into raisins and taking some of the last figs out of the dehydrator. So I’ll be in and out of the comments (can’t comment and clean grapes at the same time!).
