Walnut shells as Boucher?
Anyone have an opinion if walnut shells would make OK biochar? I have a small bag of old walnuts and was trying to think of something to do with them other than just tossing them in the compost bin. They don’t have the porous nature of wood, but I don’t know…
#biochar #grownostr
I would absolutely give it a go. I'm not sure how hot you have to get it to deactivate the juglone.
Just use the biochar to amend a bed and you should be safe. Just don’t use it in a seed starting mix unless you are sure you will get a through burn.
I don’t think juglone is gonna make it through all the burn process. Even if you get some left in there somehow, it’s not going to be enough to do anything.
I wouldn’t sweat it. Have fun burning stuff!
I'd think that if you're currently getting good biochar from whatever you're cooking biochar in, then I'd guess that making biochar the way you're doing it would work, you just might need to adjust heat and/or time because of the different nature of the shells compared to wood. I would experiment with small batches at a time and see what works well. just my 2cents worth.
I have thrown black walnut shells in a couple of my burns. They had the same texture as the wood chunks after the burn process. I didn’t examine the cross section though.
