Probable a niche read for most and not of use for everyone but anyone interested in botany, horticulture and growing will find some good information and take home principles to apply here.

Gardening is my favourite hobby. Being in an urban setup it will be difficult to have more plants . Still we have the comfort of having our own organically grown vegetables. This book explains about how to use biochar in your gardening.........

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me an eARC in exchange for my honest review. 

This guide is a fantastic resource for the new gardener, or a more practiced gardener looking to gain some tricks up their sleeve. I am a master gardener. I have had a flourishing garden for many years and I learned reading this resource how much I did not know. This book is easy to understand, and the knowledge is easily adaptable and scalable. I think this year I will become a better gardener using the methods discussed and I look forward to having the fattest tomatoes on the block. Check it out; it is well worth it.

Biochar can go a long way to supplementing the soil and fixing a number of garden problems. This book covers biochar well, including the history of it. This is an educational and vital read for anyone who grows flowers or food. It is worthy of two reads. The first for an overview, the second to make notes by.
Highly recommended.

The author clearly loves biochar and has done their homework.
I was hoping that my timber ash would qualify as biochar (spoiler alert it does not) and that I'd learn about using it in the garden. It didn't cover that but it did cover actual biochar intensively seeming to cover everything one would want to know.

Supercharge your garden with Jeff Cox. Very detailed and useful tips for all you needs. Jeff knows his subject. Recommended.

Author Jeff Cox takes an old technique and updates it for use in today’s world. Biochar is a method designed to increase the soil efficiency through the carbonized cellular structure of charcoaled organic matter. Basically, charred wood.

Mr. Cox takes us on a detailed history of how ancient cultures seem to have inadvertently stumbled across this technique, which has left a soil history we can still examine. He gives a few examples in the book of larger farms and their success in using the biochar method, then details how backyard gardeners could employ biochar to increase their own yields. The book is loaded with pictures and the layout of pictures and text is professional. A glossary of biochar definitions, a bibliography, and a list of organizations and manufacturers round out the book.

The directions on how to dig a conical pit and burn materials to successfully create biochar are detailed, as are the instructions on how to build a TLUD (Top-Lift Up-Draft) stove (I’ve also seen this referred to elsewhere as Top-Lift Updraft gasifiers). Mr. Cox has supplied the most comprehensive steps to building this yourself, and the accompanying pictures are very helpful. The author also supplies different methods to inoculate your homemade biochar, making it ready for your garden.

Mr. Cox is cautious with his examples of proof that adding biochar works, notably citing one test that indicated a modest 7% increase in food production. While this eliminated the hype associated with some other books on this topic, it also dampened my enthusiasm. Ultimately, it seems like a lot of work for a single-digit increase in veggies. The book is also much smaller (content-wise) than its listed number of pages. That professional layout with full-color pictures, at the very least, doubles this book in size. 

Like everything else, though, incorporating homemade biochar into your composting and garden-feeding routines could have a positive impact on the quality of your garden. I personally split enough wood and create enough wood chips each year to give this idea a try. The detailed instructions and helpful pictures are the best I’ve experienced. Four-and-a-half stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for an advance complimentary ebook.

Biochar is often misunderstood.  Jeff Cox, in this book, sets the record straight immediately in the preface and makes the reader want to learn more.  The book is nicely organized, first educating the reader about the history and concept of biochar, then providing specific instructions for making biochar and using it.  The writing is very easy to understand, and illustrations are helpful in showing the various types of biochar production methods.  It made me think that I could easily create biochar for my garden.  I hope that more people adopt this method, as it can really make a difference in one's carbon footprint.

Straight from ancient wisdom comes an unexpected source of plant nourishment- Biochar. Gardening with Biochar by Jeff Cox is a comprehensive guide to understanding, making, and using biochar  effectively in the home garden.


We all know that a garden is only as good as the soil that is in it. Biochar is one way of enriching the soil. Put simply, biochar is organic matter that has been roasted (and not burned) to black charcoal. In Gardening with Biochar, author Jeff Cox demystifies biochar and makes it accessible to the home gardener. 

Cox revisits history to trace the origins of biochar. He visits the area around the Amazon basin, taking a dip into the distant past. Much before the slash and burn technique (which incidentally lateralizes the soil leaving it unsuitable for agriculture), the natives used a special charcoal which we now called biochar. This black soil still exists after eons, and this in itself is testimony to its high fertility. 
Biochar is black and crumbly. Well, it is useful to get a bit of scientific description of this stuff and what it actually contains and feels like. Many people also confuse it to be a fertilizer, when it is in fact, a perfect ‘house’ for the microbes that inhabit the soil and make it fertile! It increases the water holding capacity of the soil and also acts as a storehouse of nutrients for the microbes. In addition, there are a few other peripheral advantages that biochar holds for the environment in general. These are the varied aspects of biochar that the book describes in simple terms. 

With notes from the field, that is, case studies of different farmers and agriculturalists who have tried and experienced the miracles of biochar first hand, Cox enhances the story of biochar. The book is easy to navigate, not only because it is written in simple language, but also because it is structured in an easy-to-read manner. The topic for discussion has been neatly divided into chapters and further segregated into compact subtopics. 

The book also discusses the cautions to heed to while using biochar. For instance, since biochar raises PH levels making the soil alkaline, it may not really be the best thing for acid-loving plants. 
Making biochar

Of course, the most important topic in the book is the section on actually making biochar. This chapter comes to the point- how does one actually make biochar? The book answers questions like what kind of feedstock can you put in biochar? How should you dig the pit and actually go about making the biochar so that the burn is low and slow, which is vital to producing biochar? It also discusses other ways of producing biochar, for instance, in a tlud cooker or in a metal can. This is followed by several practical tips such as how to form and follow a schedule for making biochar and so on. 
The promise of biochar lies in much more than its outstanding abilities to enrich the soil and improve plant growth. From a more long-term view, it is the ability of biochar to sequester carbon in the soil, making it good for the health of the planet, as well as the plants. 

Reading the book may perhaps convince you, to put it in the words of the author, “the fabled gold of Eldorado may actually be black and crumbly!”

Je pensais que ce livre serait un livre sur le jardinage mais il est en fait plutôt un manuel utilisant un mélange spécifique, une recette à suivre à la lettre. Je n'ai pas du tout accroché sur la méthode exposée.