Six Steps Making Char

Six steps required to make the best biochar. Alternjatively, this could be called, "NO Time to Wait!"
The short answer is making, moisturizing, micronizing, mineralizing, microbes and maturation. The next six posts will review what is meant by each of these terms. If there are editorial comments or questions, please let me know. It will make a lasting difference. Always, always, always, remeber that quality works by example and invites reciprocation. Making Char This first step in creating of biochar. In essence, all you do is heat dry plant material to between 450 and 500 degrees F (230-260 C), basically making it glow, without allowing air to get to the reaction site. This process is called pyrolysis. When the material glows, it changes form and makes it like more like fired clay, than wood or dirt. when vitrified, ut becomes permanent in the environment and not subject to degradation. Charcoal has been made around the world, throughout human history. When human beings learned of the power of char, and how it is turned into biochar is still a mystery. It is well established that as recently as 2,000 years ago, humans were making it and some tribes and cultures still use this practice in modern times. It is sad that intact cultures are referred to as primitive, because they are often far more scientifically advanced and sophisticated than that term implies. Utilizing biochar is one of the indicators of a highly advanced agriculture. My tool of choice in the matter of making char is a retort, a basic scientific instrument designed to allow heating and vapor release, without introducing oxygen (air). Typically, the retort has but one opening to allow gasses to escape, mine actually has three, but they can be closed during cooling. Here is a schematic view of a retort. Below is picture of my old retort in use and I have made other types of charring equipment as well. It is important to understand all the ways to do this step, so you can pick the one that suits your needs, available resources and needs. In my classes I discuss at least five types of charring techniques, the pit or flame cap, build and bury, similar to how much char was made before the fossil energy revolution and the current infatuation with liquid fuels; retort, of course, because it is my preferred method, the can within a can (which pretty much explains itself) which could also be called a retort in a chimney, and the TULD, Top Lit Up Draft. The method you choose varieties depends on how much you are making, what materials you have available and how pure you want/need to make your char. In addition to teaching facts about biochar, making and using it, I try to get across a feeling, or attitude of appreciation and the desire to teach and share with others the ancient miracle that is biochar. Making char requires nothing more than a basic popcorn, cookie or cracker tin. Just pop a few holes in it to release the gasses and fasten the lid on with self-tapping pan head screws, then char away. You can even use dry garden clippings, woody yard waste or herb stems, any dry woody debris will do, as long as it is completely dry. Typically, I just put the whole container right in the fire pit while enjoying a camp or bonfire. At first, the container smokes a little, but then the flammable gasses come off, making pure clean flame. When that flame dies down, and disappears, even if you shake the container around, it is finished. Lay it on a surface that won't burn with the holes you poked facing toward the ground to smother off as much air as possible from getting into the container. When it cools, it is ready to start processing. Beware though, wood and sawdust, or organic material is a good insulator, so the coals may stay warm for several hours or more depending on how large a container you use. This retort is made from a Cornelius keg, it holds five gallons of material (I prefer dry sawdust) and reduces to approximately one kilogram of material. Making char from sawdust eliminates the need for micronization, because the pieces are small enough to be used without further smashing into powder. A typical firing of a retort like this takes about three hours with dry sawdust used for the feedstock, or parent material. The value of this will become evident in later posts. (see Micronizing) As in nature, stacking functions is the key to increased efficiency.

I did not have a big enough fire pit to roast the material in this retort, a sealed 55 gallon drum, with conduit to direct the gasses out the bottom. Although it worked well enough to produce the flammable gas, it was just not enough to help warm the drum. Had I been able to build a larger bonfire, it would have been able to make over ten kilograms of finished char. That would be enough to amend a ten foot wide bed forty feet long to a depth of three inches. If you are not able to make a fire for some reason, you can use high end charcoal that is readily available at grilling outlets. Typically it has names like natural charcoal, cowboy charcoal or lump charcoal. Essentially it should appear like burned wood. If it has been compacted into uniform briquets, typically it will have contaminants and binders that reduce the quality of your finished product. In this case, I must admit that I am a bit of a carbon snob. The goal is to get the open grains of the wood's cellular structure, binders, paint, stain and other foreign material can close the ends of the pores and render the finished product either contaminated or useless. If you had a scanning electron microscope, tiny particles of the finished product would look like this: It is really that simple. Dry organic, woody material, the cellular structure of the plant is what gets preserved at approximately half size. As the material is heated, the gasses liberated are nearly pure oxygen and hydrogen, these flammable gasses must be able to leave the retort and they will readily be burned off during the process. The nice thing about the retort is that when the gasses stop coming out, you know that the char is done roasting. After removing the retort from the fire, loosely plug or cover the hole(s) to keep air out and let the char cool. Another way to tell if the char is done is to feel the weight of the container. When finished, the char is very light and when you touch finished char, there will be very little black carbon that sticks to your hands. Incompletely fired or poorly pyrolized char will still have oily soot-like residue. It gets your hands dirty when you handle it and it will smell or taste of creosote. A good way to tell if char is finished is to smell or taste it. There will be no taste or smell. The best char, is pure carbon. After it cools, if you stir the pieces, it will almost sound metallic or like broken glass shards, especially after it is moistened, but that will be covered in the next post. Poorly made char can degrade as it breaks down in soil, so take care and do whatever it takes to make the best char possible, it will reward future generations, many times over, not only for seven generations, but for geologic time.

There are other ways to make char and they include something called a flame cap burner, basically a container that does not allow air in either the bottom or sides. In this method, you have to build a rick. (a rick is like a log cabin, but the logs are layered from side to side like a nearly solid floor on each level, but to maximize air flow, room is left around each log, stick or branch, not like a solid floor of wood, but a lattice in three dimensions.) A small fire is built atop the rick and when the material burns down, you will notice that the fire only exists at the top of the vessel, where air first contacts the hot gasses. Material inside will just glow, but not burn. Keep adding material until all that is left is the glowing bed of coals, when the flame cap stops burning, the gasses have all been released, the char is done and has to be quenched with water or have a loosely fitting lid ready to cover the vessel to keep air out. This method is great if you do not have strict burning regulations because it gets smoky if you put too much material on at once. The ideal rate for adding material to the flame cap burner is evidenced by the absence of smoke. You want a very clean burn, if you get any smoke, either you have put too much on at once, the inside of the container is not hot enough, or the material is too wet to char. This can even be accomplished by just digging a hole in the ground and building your fire large enough to fill the pit with glowing embers. Quench or smother them out with the soil that remains from digging the hole. It is "primitive", but if you know what to do and how to know it is done, it can work beautifully. The TLUD (Top Lit Up Draft) burner and the vessel within vessel method are also useful if you have the materials and metal-working skills to make them. First, for the vessel within a vessel technique, you would need a small, sealing, steel container and it would need to fit within another larger steel container, I have seen them made from a 30 gallon drum inside a fifty five gallon drum. Holes are made in the bottom of the thirty gallon vessel 2-4 inches (5-10 cm) up from the bottom, to allow gasses to escape. This container is then filled with the material you are going to char and sealed. The larger drum also has holes in the bottom and is kept up off the ground at the start to let fresh air in when lighting the fire, but since they are in the bottom, when the burn is complete, you can pretty much seal them closed by simple lowering the container to the ground. The larger drum also has a lid, but it needs to have a hole prepared to accept a stovepipe. About six feet of stovepipe above the penetration in the lid, to keep all the smoke up and away from people. This device is very smoky upon starting as can be the TLUD In any case, the large drum gets propped up off the ground to start the burn, the smaller vessel, once filled with material to be charred and the opening of the drum is sealed, it goes into the larger vessel, atop a bed of tinder and other fire starting material, vent holes down. The inner drum is propped up off the bottom as well. The space under the smaller vessel holds the kindling wood and helps air to flow upward during the main burn. The next step is to be to fill the space around the inner drum with dry, burnable material An easy way to start the burn is to make ready some coals, like you would use for grilling, dump them down into the tinder and quickly fill the drum with the wood, quickly capping it and installing the stovepipe. As the outer wood burns, it begins to heat the inner drum and as that happens, flammable gasses begin to escape making the fire hotter. Eventually the smoke stops as the outer sleeve of wood goes to char, then ash, but by then the additional heat, from the escaping gasses leaving the inner vessel, continue to burn, also heating the inner vessel. This allows it to finish the process. As the material finishes, less and less gasses are produced until there is no more flame, just glowing coals within the inner vessel. At that point let the outer drum drop to the ground, sealing out the air. Some people like to throw a "seal" of sand around the edge, or do that and then moisten the sand to help keep out the air that could get in the bottom. I have not worried about it and done well, just getting a good solid seal on flat ground. To reduce the updraft of the chimney, which could draw air in the bottom, you could add a flue damper. The TLUD kiln is similar to the flame cap, but the flame essentially working its way to the bottom, using up all the available oxygen before it can burn the char all the way to ash. I'm not completely thrilled with this technique because some creosote residue might be deposited on the finished char. I have not fired one myself and it requires one to not have to worry about making lots of smoke, again when you get it started, it will smoke to beat the ban, until the flame front gets established. In a TLUD kiln, it works like the flame cap, but the air coming in the bottom is severely limited, and the flame actually advances down from the top, as it goes toward the small amount of air, it uses up all the oxygen in the process of burning and the hot material left behind is hot enough to continue to give off gasses. In this sort of kiln, typically, they run a stack with an afterburner to burn off the gasses when they finally get out into the air. These can be impressive and may bring to mind a fire breathing dragon! To my understanding, having the material loosely packed in the kiln is crucial to success, you can't pack the material in the kiln because the air flow, although small, is crucial. When packing the TULD kiln, the feedstock needs to be about as dense as a natural sponge, so air flows around and through the material, rather than if it were packed tightly, or irregularly, it would choke off the air flow, burn unevenly or only partially char. I plan to make one of these and try it for myself. The people who use them swear by them. You can put any vessel over fire, as long as you have somewhere the flammable gasses can escape. When the gasses stop coming off, if you stir the material and the flame does not continue, or flare up, pull it from the fire and put a loose fitting lid on it, seal it with the ground, or quench it out with water, because as it contracts, air will make it into the retort, but the goal is to not have it touch any glowing char that has not yet cooled below 400 F, otherwise it could continue to burn when oxygen gets in. I have had batches where the integrity of the seal was compromised and the char continued burning for over ten hours, without me even noticing. I went to sleep and in the morning, the container was still warm, opening it revealed the embers had consumed almost half the char! When making char in any sort of retort, it is important to wait until the material is fully cooled before exposing it to the air. If you do not, it can reignite on contact with air. The still warm char gets wasted when it turns to white ash. Keeping this white ash production to a minimum in all but the most acidic of soils and getting the highest percentage pure carbon as possible is the goal. It is critical to getting the most from your effort. The most important thing to remember about white ash, is that it is very alkaline, lye is made from fully burned ashes. DO NOT USE white ash. It is no longer carbon, even that gets burnt. Once burned to white ash, only minerals remain. We want the carbon, that is what benefits the soil, when it becomes fully pyrolized. Wood that has not fully charred will decay and lose carbon as well, so make sure that you fully char the material you use. The embers must glow and completely, lose all their hydrogen and oxygen. Pure, vitrified carbon will remain fixed in soil for geologic time. Once prepared this charred material has fourteen acres of surface area per handful. All that surface area needs to be nourished to become a healthy precursor to soil. That is whay the next five posts will cover. Basic science rules those phases, but for now, keeping with the title of this post, making char is easy, if one has some simple tools, a fire and patience to make sure your woody material is fully finished before you remove it from the fire. I will cover more about the golden ratio of minerals and nutrients, in the post "Mineralization" If you choose to make a retort, vessel in vessel, TULD burner, or use a flame cap method, the only requirement is to have complete pyrolysis without either un-charred material or white ash. The best tests for quality are look and feel, smell and taste. It should be ultralight and the darkest black you will ever see. Occasionally it may have a rainbow oxidization, but the predominant feature is to be super black (the best char sounds a bit like glass when pieces are touched together. You will hear a hollowness to the pieces and they will be very light) Testing char quality by smell, (should smell fresh, not like creosote or smoke) Char is a great deodorizer. There should also be no taste; again, smoky or oily flavors are evident straight away. Material not thoroughly heated for long enough will smell like smoke. Excellent char will not taste like anything, in fact, the predominant sensation is that it sucks moisture from your tongue. Truly an anti-taste. This material is so much more valuable than gold, I cannot begin to tell you. This beginning ingredient, char, when treated and processed properly will double crop production when added at the rate of one kilogram per cubic meter of soil, or roughly two pounds per cubic yard. If anyone ever needs help determining how much char they need, please contact me directly. My land line is nine twenty, double 8 four, triple two 4. Mornings in Wisconsin (Central Time) are the best time to reach me. Best wishes on your journey. When you use your char and see the benefits, think about who taught you how to make it and send a token of thanks. Think long and hard about the principles within sustainability, which urge us to equitably distribute the abundance. That is all I ask. Ubuntu as they say in Africa, namaste' as they say in India. We are each incarnations of the godhead and without a single one of us, all would be diminished. I truly am, because of you! Appreciatively, Tony C. Saladino

Helpful Composting Information.

Many people have heard the recipe for compost; 1/3 fresh green waste, 1/3 dry brown waste and 1/3 food waste sprinkled with a handful of healthy soil, about one handful of soil for every shovel full of waste. Nearly everyone has heard that you need to water your compost from time to time as well, keeping it about as wet as a wrung out sponge. Most people also recommend turning the pile several times over about 90 days, to spread biological activity (diversity)throughout the pile and aerate it as well, which aids breakdown. Yes, yes, I know that most people don't like to turn the piles and I get it. however, that is the best way to make the compost work quickly and to yield the most uniform finished product possible. What I want to focus on in this post is the two other considerations that you need to take into account for higher level processing, making boutique compost and creating the best compost for your purposes. These involve the Carbon Nitrogen Ratio, which halps the compost to break down quickly, but also the Fungal:Bacterial Ratio which has more to do with how developed your soils are, or the type of plant life that you want to enrich your soil with using that compost. The right compost changes based on what sorts of plantas you are growing. In light of the fact that all composts are not created equal, this is to help suss out what is important for your specific applications and management goals. I urge some of the same considereations be made when maturing char nito biochar, but even for compost it is worth paying attention to these easily overlooked aspects of compost.

First, we will deal with producing compost, generally: transforming waste into black gold, this requires understanding carbon to nitrogen ratios. If you mix up a compost pile that has too much carbon, it slows the composting process. Too much nitrogen and you end up with a stinky pile. Wood chips 400:1 Cardboard (shredded) 350:1 Saw Dust 325:1 Newspaper (shredded) 175:1 Pine Needles 80:1 Straw and Corn Stalks 75:1 Leaves 60:1 Peanut Shells and Fruit Wastes 35:1 Then, we get into the range of what composts most easily, right between the magical range from about 25 to 30 to one ratio. (Carbon:Nitrogen)Things like: Weeds and Garden Waste 30:1 Wood Ashes, Vegetable Scraps and Hay 25:1 Beyond that we get into the stuff that needs more Carbon to compost well, like Clover 23:1 Coffee Grounds, Food Waste and Grass Clippings 20:1 Seaweed 19:1 Manures 15:1 Alfalfa 12:1 Human Feces and Urine 8:1 Before you get offended or upset, the U.S. of A. Federal rules for application of human urine to cropland is six months between application and harvest for human consumption and a full year between application and harvest for human fecal matter. It also allows the material to be composted for those same lengths of time prior to application and then no specified period between application and harvest is required. Gettign the ratio right makes th eentire process go faster and with less smell. It is worth figuring out exactly what you are putting in, so you can get the best results, the most and the greaest functionality from what you get, so keep these concentrations in mind when mixing up your specific compost bin or pile. Secondly, soils go through a life span as well, pay attention to where the soils you have are in their development, and where you want them to go. This part of the development of specific composts rests on wher ethey will be used. If you only have microbial crusts and lichen, that is the earliest phase of soil generation. Areas that ar elike that can't just fast forward to garden soil overnight, it will require several years or more of development. You can only push nature sofar, so fast. These proto soils cannot offer anything fungal hyphae might want and there are some microbes that exude anti-fungal substances, so even if you introduced them, they would die out. If you can only grow pioneer weeds, the probable fungal-bacterial ratio is around 0.1 to 0.3 to one. When Early-successional grasses come in, that increases to 0.3 to 0.6 to one. Mid-successional grasses indicate 0.7 to 0.85 to one and Late-sucessional grasses row crops and vegetables thrive on soils with 0.9 to 1.5 to one ratios. Shrubs, vines and native prairie typically range from 2-15 to one. Deciduous Forest typically weighs in at 5-50 to one. Conifer Old-Growth Forest ranges 50-100 to one with not only rich, but diverse communities of fungi and virtually no bacteria. So, what does that mean where the rubber hits the road? Your farm, acreage or own back yard? If you ar emaking compost for the deep dark recesses of a forest preserve, you would make sure to have fungal spores from diverse communities included in the mix. You might do the same for makign compost that was to be used in a mature deciduous forest. Even if you are managing for a vineard or parairie restoration, you would probably want to be sure to add substantial fungal representatives within your compost mix. When the compost is for vegetable beds or rows, you may get plenty of fungal spores from the air itself, another reason to turn the pile periodically and protect the compost from the sun with mulch immediately after it is applied.

Upcoming Class Near MPLS

Next week, we will be having a day-long biochar class. It will be held near Osceola, about an hour Northeast of Minneapolis. I can be reached for more information, by e-mail at: biocharmaster@gmail.com Contact me to reserve tickets.

Lake Superior Traditional Ways Gathering

Char created, approx. 130 gallons everyone who received char also received instruction on turning it into a forever soil amendment that will enhance the habitat available for the soil microbiome for tens of thousands of years!

This was my process laid out to mimic the timeline. First, on the left, a small retort made from a dog dish and a lid found at St. Vincent DPaul thrift store as well as a cookie tin and self tapping screws. When making char using a retort like this, you need to put your dry woody material inside the tin, secure the lid with three self-tapping screws, then poking a few holes in the top to let the flammable gasses escape. The evidence that you char has finished, is when th egasses stop coming out, to cool, just flip the container upside down, holes down on a relatively flat surface that is fire proof. Between the two retorts for making char is a one ounce chunk of completely pyrolyzed char, propped up on an herbal supplememnt container. For scale, the container is just over four inches (10.16 cm)tall and two inches wide (5.08 cm) on the bottom part The white lid is 2 1/8 inches (5.4 cm)across.The one ounce chunk easily fits inside. Just a handful of char has fourteen acres of surface area, so adding the proper amount of nutrients, minerals and essential life takes time. The next two items can be interchanged, but the best end of the wood to mount the crusher was after the screening step. In fact, they must be interchanged, until it is crushed, it can't really be screened. I heard of an event that took place this weekend, where three and a half tons of char were "danced" down into small particles! That will be some seriously energized material! The crusher in small scale can be a hand crank coffee mill. Larger scale crushers can be made from concrete mixers with a few boulders in them, hammer mills and grain mills are also serviceable. A functional large scale screen can also be made by inserting 1/8 inch (2mm)screen inside a slotted 55 gallon drum, then rolling it on a tarp or over a wheelbarrow. Again, for maximum efficiency and carbon free operation, human powered units count for more carbon storage points than electric ones. Beyond that, of course are the nutrients and minerals. I found an eloquent way of saying succinctly what folks need to know about nutrients and minerals. Add nutrients and minerals that are abundant under your management scheme and cultural practices. That allows each farm to understand the words the way their scale and particular land offers. If you have livestock and manure is available, use it! If you have slaughter operations, or catch a lot of fish, use that waste! As many sources as you can get, added a little at a time. When you can't have the scent of the nutrients disappear after stirring the char for a few days, stop adding, you are approaching stauration! Between the black box and the blue box, is where the longest part of the process takes place, adding microbes and allowing time for their maturation. Think of it like having a pet for about six to ten weeks. During this phase, you need to check on and stir your 3-D black petri dish two to three times every day. At 14 acres (5.6656 ha.)per handful,microbes need many, many generations to populate it.Since most of them are not very mobile, the stirring helps tranfer them surface to surface, so stir them with love and compassion, you don't want to be aggressive and violent about the stirring, but just take some effort to thoroughly mix the material, it really helps get the transfer to take place. If youhave done well, providing a wide varit=ety of nutrients and minerals will enhance the availability of habitable space when the ransfer is complete. Several "tricks" exist for getting good microbial communities. It does not hurt to have them be local either, the stronger the members and local winners of the local microbiome, the stronger your biochar will be. Find the best microbes under compost heaps, elder trees wherever your best soils are, or make a compost tea. Try a little of all three! The blue topped container is the biological "test" that I use to determine whether char is "done" or not. The sides, which I temporarily segregate with a small piece of cardbord, are labelled "WORMY SOIL" and "BIOCHAR" I fill the two sides, then remove the cardboard, loosely cover it overnight in the garage or basement. If the worms can be found on the biochar side the next day, it is ready to be released into the environment. I have had them reject the char and after stirring and keeping th emoisture level perfect, abotu a swet as a wrung out sponge, they deemed it finished! At the very end were a few containers of crushed, charred material that I had for sale, enough to do three to five gallons and a larger one that would be enough for a four by four foot (1.2m X 1.2m) bed. After the burn, the tools were packed up and the buckets were filled with finished char. We also had a few larger volume containers, a couple thirty gallon ones and a twenty gallon one, plus a half dozen containers large enough to hold two grocery bags full each. It was a veritable char fiesta!

The Great Reset

In the course of human events, one often needs what we might think of as a a page break, a place to catch our breath, change our behaviors for a moment and briefly do something physical intead of what we were doing before. If we seem to be running on a treadmill, this might take the form of stepping off, going to the rowing machine for a while. If we have been riffing on a certain tune in out heads for a while, perhaps a change of station. When studying hard for finals, why not take a half hour to watch a favorite show or listen to a favorite piece of music, with the books closed? It often can be a great way to revive when times get tough, take a break or change oyur activity level even for five minutes! When we need a more significant break, often we cannot know why or how long it will need to be, but we just know, instinctively, to put down those tools and walk away, before mistakes are made that cannot easily be erased. In very real ways, covid-19 has provided an opportunity as well as a hardship. Many of us have had more time off in the past year than we have had in our entire adult lives. This may provide such a page break for our culture, perhaps all of humanity.
My part in this is to stir the pot of course. This viscous social space and time are liable to stick to the bottom of the pan without folks willing to stir things up deeply and vigorously. https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-80-acres-of-wisconsin-for-outdoor-school The 100% volunterer not-for-profit that my wife and I and a handful of friends created to teach eco-ehtics is twenty years old and we have lots of great projects that attest to our unconventional approach. We have helped to plant over sixty thousand native trees across Northeast Wisconsin in forty or more locations. We have planted over a hundred acres with native perennial food crops, medicinal plants and plants used as dyestock for natural dyes. We have hosted hundreds of events to share what we know about living more sustainable lifestyles, from plant-ins to composting lessons, biochar classes and square foot ECO-Tours. We have presented informaion to thousands of readers around the world through digital media and when people ask what we charge, we often just ask them to give what they can afford. When we plant a tree, it is the best one suited to each particular location, not a specimine tree that stands out against a background of native trees, but what literally belongs there. We have used several techniques to get free trees to plant, and often, now, we only plant tree seeds, becaus etheir roots experience far less trauma when th eseedlings can start where they will eventually grow. We have stood the paradigm of commercialism on end, not asking for money as much as to be seen, to be heard as we speak for the trees. We have led canoe trips down some of the most pristine as well as some of the most impacted rivers around, participated in Earth Day events and been involved regionally in diverse groups that advocate for th egreat Lakes generally and renewable, clean energy and pro-peace groups as well. I was trained as a teacher in a time when the jargon was all about knowledge skills and attitudes. Knowledge lives in your mind but can exist without outward evidence, skills only exist as action and can be seen, practiced, perfected and can only be made your own through repetition and attitudes, like knowledge only exist internally, although sometimes they can be plain to see, because they are reflected in many of our actions.
This group, these projects, have never been expected to be as important as they turn out to be. In our experience, nothing done as a group can ever be fully appreciated until much later. Creating memories and the deep sort of knowing that our tours engender has such long term impacts that generations down th eroad, ther emay be benefits completely unrelated to the time or place, bu tsomething heard or seen will bring back information or ideas that resurface at just the right moment, or help imform an action that has become instinctive, bu tthat has th epower to teach someone else. Living amongst such a technologically focused society, there is something that deeply enriches us when we love a plant's roots into the soil, easing them down so they are comfortable in the world they will inhabit for many years and whose very life changes the world around them for the better.
Only once per century has Mother Nature felt it necessary to still humanity with a deadly virus of this severity. It comes to us to make the best of what we have, that means with the deadly virus as well. As Cat Stevens wrote so eloquently, "Take your time, think a lot, why think of everything you've got; for you will still be here tomorrow but your dreams may not." In this Great Reset we are being granted a chance to change everything we have known, reevaluate whether it served us, decide wha tto leave behind and in very real ways what we are going to create. Let us not shirk from th echallenge, but put our foot down firmly and move forward. As was drilled into me as a child, I say to everyone now, we can all have total freedom, but only if we are willing to be supremely responsible. We cannot have one without the other.

This is a photo of a simple tool caddy, easy to make, keeps long-handled tools at hand and easy to organize. This rack can be adapted to your needs but I learned of it from a props person on a touring show. when you need th ewhole village to get to the implements, quickly, this is a great way to have them handy an all in one place. Please share this blog with friends. share our go fund me page widely. We don't have any time to lose! If not now, when? If not us, who?