The past few months, we’ve been covering the story of the 2012 CenUSA biochar test or demonstration gardens at three Minnesota sites.
Lynne Hagen has been providing us with the inside scoop on what they are learning about biochar, how they chose the biochar, how they prepared the three MN test garden sites, and most recently, she shared the 2012 challenges of these biochar test gardens.
2012 CenUSA Biochar Demonstration Gardens Report
Wait no more to get the detailed scoop on how the gardens performed with biochar as a soil amendment in 2012, the first year of this research project.
The first year’s data has been gathered and summarized in this 2012 CenUSA Biochar Demonstration Garden Report (PDF).
The report covers project research design details and data collection as it relates to specific annual, vegetables, and shrub roses used in all of the CenUSA biochar demonstration gardens. Overall, the summary emphasizes the need for continual research to best understand how biochar affects these garden soils and crops:
The more we learn about biochar, the more we need to learn. From an overall standpoint, there appeared to be some benefit of using biochar in the nutrient-depleted sandy soils at the Andover site for some crops. Yet, there was a decrease in growth in some plants and higher yield in others. In the Arboretum and St. Paul campus sites, we noted similar results, but more crops seemed to decline with biochar than without it.
In 2013, continual improvements will be made to streamline data collection, making sure volunteers are asked to collect the data most important to research results. Projects leaders will also focus on developing a clearer and easier method for documenting the data to help guarantee more consistency in data reporting.
Data will continue to be collected and analyzed across 4 out of the 5 years of the CenUSA Bioenergy project. One result is clear from the first year’s research: Extension Master Gardener volunteers have been instrumental and valued in their support on this research project.
Stay Tuned for Biochar Demonstration Garden Updates in 2013!
Stay tuned, in the next couple months, we’ll take you through the events of 2013 as we watch the story of the CenUSA Bioenergy demonstration gardens unfold in the second year of research!
-Karen Jeannette
“The CenUSA Bioenergy project is supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant No. 2011-68005-30411 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.”