Wood Ash

[74 Survivalist]

Wood ash can be used in many ways taking advantage of it’s chemical properties. I hadn’t been producing ash in any volume worth speaking of for a long time, but now we are heating with a wood stove and a garden in the back, I have a good use and a place to use it. The linked article is about the benefits of wood ash in the garden. http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/wood-ash-can-be-useful-yard-if-used-caution

• This topic was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by  74.

[MountainBiker Survivalist]

I generate a lot of wood ash through the winter being we heat the front half of the house with a wood stove. I spread it across the garden during the winter and what doesn’t wash in when the snow melts gets rototilled in in the Spring. It is a very large garden (75X170′) and so there is plenty of space to spread it around.

[freedom Survivalist]

I didn’t know that it was used for the garden. I will use it this winter.

[L Tecolote Survivalist]

Wood ash and chicken poop sure made the tomatoes grow in a garden I once had. I heard a nutritionist on the radio point out that one of the great “contributors” to the declining strength and vigor of us moderns, as compared to our pioneering ancestors, is the lack of mineral in our modern diet.

Nowadays, industrial farming is done by spreading just enough nutrients (e.g., ammonia) to “goose” the plants into growing large, not necessarily nutritious, but profitable. A generation or two back, when many people heated with wood, they put their ashes on the garden plot, and got the benefit of dietary minerals that many of us would have to buy in supplement pill form. Spreading wood ashes on the garden makes sense to me.

For those where it is available, alfalfa meal, pellets, or cubes, tilled into the soil, can add minerals as well.

Cry, "Treason!"

[Robin Survivalist]

Use ash to make lye soap.
Robin

[74 Survivalist]

Wood ash is used for ceramic glazes as well. http://pottery.about.com/od/glazeatmosphere/tp/ashrec.htm
Presumably someone will need new pottery at some point.

[Author]

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