Winter comes in all varieties in Australia - wet, cold, dry, sunny - much like soils, this country has an impressive range.
Composting and top-dressing are easy ways to incorporate biochar into your soils in winter, and with the array of bare-root roses and fruit trees available in nurseries at the moment, it’s a prime time to get some biochar right into the rhizosphere (root zone) while you’re planting.
Planting bare-root roses & fruit trees
Add biochar into the planting hole and mix with backfill material so it makes around 10% of the total soil volume. It'll help stimulate root growth and microbial life, and will stay in the soil for years to help hold water and nutrients available for the plant.Our Biochar + Frass is a complete soil conditioner and fertiliser, perfect to use in new plantings for an initial boost to root growth and healthy soil life in the years to come.
If you want to customise a nutrient profile to suit your particular soil or plants, use Blended Biochar and add your preferred mix of nutrient sources like compost, manure, worm castings, seaweed solution, fish emulsion, or synthetic NPK.
Top dressing
We're often asked if you can top-dress with biochar - yes, you can! Our Ultra-Fine Biochar is great for top-dressing, you can apply it to existing plants, garden beds and lawns and let worms and water do all the hard work.
Sprinkle two to four cups (four to eight handfuls) of Ultra-Fine Biochar per square metre. Target the base of plants, and water in well with a liquid fertiliser like seaweed solution or fish emulsion to add nutrients.
Composting
Adding biochar to your compost is an easy win - because of biochar's large surface area and ability to bulk up free spaces between raw compost ingredients, it helps keep the heat in your compost pile (to extend the thermophilic stage) and improves water retention and aeration, which creates even more favourable conditions for microbial activity.
Our Blended Biochar is great for this, with a mix of particle sizes from fine to coarse. Add biochar to your compost to make up around 5 to 20% of the total compost volume, or a few generous handfuls between each layer as you're building the pile.
You can add biochar at at any stage of the process, at least two weeks before using your compost. The earlier the better! By Spring you'll have a super-charged biochar + compost mix that's perfect for adding directly to vegie beds and new plantings.