Making Terra Preta Soil: Ramona's Recipe for Home-Made Dirt

We looked like coal miners by the time all that charcoal-pounding and ground-tilling was all over.  By the time I got done with my long shower, I was so tired that I could barely stand up.  Mike made me go sit down and have a cold beer, and I got better after a couple of hours – or was it, a couple of beers?  Probably both, and using them to wash down several glucosamines, of course.  Surprisingly, I was able to get out of bed the following day, which I attribute to the glucosamine.  SO DON'T FORGET THE GLUCOSAMINE!  'Nuff said.

TERRA PRETA "SECOND DAY OF CREATION"

Later, after several days of rest (after all, God himself took several of his kind of days to finish making his own dirt), I poured a mix of water, beer and citrus-flavored soft drink over the area.  You pour one beer and one citrus-flavored drink into five gallons of water, and then sprinkle it over the ground.  It is important that both of these be the regular and not the low-calorie or sugarless kind of beer and soft drink.  Low-cal beer is made of rice and lacks the amount of yeast that regular beer has.  The yeast in the beer feeds on the sugar in the soft drink, which then gives a jump-start to the beneficial bacteria in the ground.  

You can use cheap beer for this particular job – plants and bacteria don't have much of a palate, after all. 


TERRA PRETA "THIRD DAY OF CREATION"

About a week later, I added the beneficial nematodes.   I didn't add them on the same day as the beer because I suspect that nematodes can't handle their alcohol and I didn't want them to get soused in there.  So while you're waiting for the beer to sink in (to the ground, I mean), you can store your nematodes in the refrigerator for a few days or even a few weeks.  Appetizing – NOT.

BE PATIENT

Be aware that the charcoal has to absorb the nitrogen and nutrients before it can give any back to the plants.  For this reason, it could be awhile before the terra preta becomes truly fertile for plants, so you have to be patient with it.  That was the reason that I listed organic fertilizer as a jump-starter for the terra preta garden, to both feed the plants in the interim and to help load up the charcoal with nutrients. 

And that's how we made our own terra preta soil.  There is not a lot of hard science on this, so there is plenty of room for improvisation in developing your own recipe.

So good luck and happy gardening!

 1  |  2  |  3