Transcript of Making Bamboo Charcoal in a Kon-Tiki Kiln
Courtney Brooke: So I was coming to park in my driveway at my house and then it’s like well there’s a fire in my driveway. So now we’re going to see what’s happening with a driveway fire. Something is happening here. It’s Dimitri in his natural habitat.
Dimitri: (Natural Habitat Monkey Noises)
Courtney Brooke: What are you doing Dimitri?
Dimitri: I’m making charcoal. Biochar with bamboo and with this little metal cone-like structure which is some people call a kontiki kontiki.
Courtney Brooke: Yeah okay so you cut the bamboo down is that bamboo dry?
Dimitri: It’s six, it was cut six weeks ago, so it’s not fully dry because we’re in winter time. Once We’re going into spring, but you could see that it’s duller than usual.
Courtney Brooke: Okay so you cut the bamboo, now you’re over here, and you’re making it into charcoal.
Dimitri: Yeah and like as you see ashes here you see like the ashes here, that’s when you want to add more bamboo to it.
Courtney Brooke: And then you’re squirting with the water hose?
Dimitri: Not yet. At the end.
Courtney Brooke: At the end. yeah okay. And then, and then, this is something that you already made?
Dimitri: This is some of this is the first batch we made in there.
Courtney Brooke: there so that was that’s how much came out of this contiki kiln.
Dimitri: yep
Courtney Brooke: Okay what are you using this for?
Dimitri: Well what inspired it was to maybe use it as infill like insulation in my walls of this new um extension of my hut i’m making for to have a kitchen basically and so we’re thinking about this being insulative because it has all these tiny holes in it and let’s check it out and um yeah and there’s so much surface area and little tiny holes and we thought that it could act as a nice insulation also being great for the earth because now we’re like storing carbon in my walls for probably decades or centuries
Courtney Brooke: That’s so exciting.
Dimitri: Yeah, um but then there’s just like so many other ideas around using this like we can you can make also adobe bricks you can like have it for agricultural use like we could make we’re thinking about maybe like what if we got a um a blacksmith to like weld a six-foot version of this so yeah like we can cut these into like six foot lengths and put in way bigger chunks and like make way more biochar for like the community for all the different uses and like have them in our bamboo grove so like like utilizing them bamboo that we’re basically just cutting because they’re just spreading into the roads and just leaving the carbons up going back into the atmosphere but now we could actually utilize it so we could have charcoal we can like put in our gardens our farms um you know so many like keep it in room spaces to help with mold and smells
Courtney Brook: Hooray for charcoal. Okay well stay tuned for for how it all works out with Dimitri’s building project.
Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live.
Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing.
Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between.
Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.
Lee Warren
How do you make it so that the bamboo doesn’t explode (pop) from the heat building up in the chambers?