Home Made Fertilizer Potency Test (making Potassium Nitrate from Scratch Part III)

[@folsterfarms]

Watching in May 2022 - I want you to know how much I appreciated you sticking with this process and posting the results. KZbin channel development is not for the weak-willed! Who knew the US would be having a fertilizer shortage a year after you posted this information?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

I would love to say that I did - major disruptions are inevitable, but the exact time? Above my pay grade.

[@budkingston3347]

I knew there would be a shortage November 2020

[@censorthis-uu6cc]

When disease is being engineered on a mass scale, you can be sure that war & famine will not be far behind.

[@robertjenkins5440]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry i am very interested in this brother!...if you were to add food scrap's like banana peel's and other potassium rich scrap's, do you think that would increase the amount of potassium nitrate's in the mix?...would also like to add, if you want your filtered product to dry faster you bake it on a low heat in an oven to get rid of the moisture!...also if you want to create this process in larger amount's i would suggest talking to a local cattle farmer about getting some of their corral "clean up" to take home!...just a suggestion that might come in handy

[@MegaFarkh]

If farms used the pee and manure from cattle with leftover of plants,they wouldn't need fertilizers at all or use 10% of what they are using now

[@grantjones6748]

After a year of peeing in wood chips and then draining the minerals out he gets a liquid that looks like pee.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Exactly my first impression, too 😁

[@_anthony_4712]

And it taste like nitrates.

[@glennllewellyn7369]

Yippp... Peeeee!!!

[@علم-ح1ح]

لماذه لم تستعمل روث الحيوان اريد جواب

[@skr9]

​@@علم-ح1ح 😂

[@c62west]

Thanks!

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

You are very welcome! For best results, the old timers back in Appalachia would pool their black earth together - it makes it easier to reach critical saturation with more nitrate in solution. If you don't have a LOT of material to start, you can add already processed nitrate to reach saturation - just subtract what you added from the yield to figure out how much you made. (this is the one step that I did not show in the process)

[@patchvonbraun]

The main part of wood ash that is useful in this context is the potassium oxide (up to 30% of the mass of the ash), which upon dissolving in the water produces potassium hydroxide, which is why it's also used in soap making. The resulting potassium ions will undergo an exchange reaction (metathesis or displacement) with the quantities of mostly magnesium and sodium and calcium nitrates formed from the urine, and the small amounts of *potassium* nitrate from the urine of course remain untouched by this process.

[@kiljupullo]

Thanks that was good scientific answer. Now I understand it better and why it happens.

[@ChrisGilliamOffGrid]

You've convinced me to just buy a lifetime supply of Potassium Nitrate while it's cheap.

[@ted_van_loon]

sadly in europe it is illegal without a special hard to get and expensive licence which is mostly reserved to friends of political leaders and big corporations to buy it, so for people here making it is the only option in general. luckily where I live we have a secret trick up our sleeves and that is places where the soil is heavily enriched with it around some farms allowing to make it much faster and with a lot less work technically seen. ofcource knowing the full normal process should still be knowledge many people should know just in case.

[@pro2a89]

@@ted_van_loon if you in denmark you have a looæ hole somwher under the danish firearm and explosive substanis act subsection 2 does not aplay to part b or d pyrotechnical articas, so gusse whos ordering

[@szogun1987]

You can buy it as a farmer, you just have to sign some paper. A couple of years before it was available for Christmas and Easter as we preserve self-made meat with it. I will check next March if it is still available. I've tried to find a stamp removal based on it 2 years ago but I failed.

[@cazcov]

15:54 not a single person is surprised by the roaches crawling up the wall.

[@lurchie]

Love the slo-mo owl shot!

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

We had one cruising the neighborhood, looking for a nesting site .. the hackberry tree next door has some nice cavities, and we had hoped to get footage of her .. but never did get our own .. so a brief tease from pixabay video is all you get 😁

[@kimskluckers5665]

Wow you were incredibly patient to complete this process. Thank you.

[@SustainablyYoursHomestead]

11:44 I laughed hard when I read your shirt; like, literally snorted. I'm loving the backyard chemistry! This has been a super cool process!

[@WinkTartanBelle]

Having trained and worked in a lab, i'm conflicted. This makes me cringe, but also gladdens my soul. Well done, considering what you are working with.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Definitely NOT a controlled experiment .. I used volumetric measurements in some places, mass measurements in others, did not record temperatures, left material on the burner long enough to scorch it (and start over) and on and on .. Next time, I will just send my samples out to the OSU Ag lab to be assayed.

[@ted_van_loon]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry well I like the personal aproach you take, shows what one can realistically expect. well perhaps to test the soil quality itself for plants you could try to estimate it with some of those acidity measurement strips and such which they use to measure such things at highschools.

[@jessiejackson8502]

Nice work! Had to come back and find this video after seeing it a couple of years ago... Ardmore has an Ag Department as well and does testing and what nots. 🤠 Stay safe, and be well BUD!

[@jimgaston9863]

Catching the urine after leeching thru the wood chips and ageing it with leaf mould for 6 months would have gave you 20 gallons of liquid urea to fertilize your tomatoe plants for decades. Fresh urine also provides all the nutrients plants need when diluted at 1/4 cup a gallon. Much easier ways to fertilize but a fun project. Cheers.

[@JamesWhite-tg4kw]

Go to your local fairgrounds I'm sure they would be glad to have you help clean up manure after the fair is over an start composting much easier

[@IntheBlood67]

Thankyou fer taking the time to educate us! Much appreciated!

[@nole8923]

Gunpowder in the 17th century must have been exceedingly expensive. Potassium nitrate is the most difficult part to make. My curiosity about this stems from imagining if I went through a time portal and found myself in the dark ages I would need to know how to make gunpowder and steel. I could become a king with that knowledge. Not just for firearms but also the knowledge of steel to make steam engines.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Getting nitrate in a form that is useful for fertilizer is easy enough .. but extracting and removing impurities so that it can be used for food preservation or as an oxidizer is the tough part for sure!

[@magnuspitruzelli]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry can you use ocean water to make potassium nitrate in the same manner .

[@commonsense-og1gz]

@@magnuspitruzelli you can make nitrate from the birkeland-eyde process.

[@magnuspitruzelli]

@@commonsense-og1gz thanks for thr tip.

[@commonsense-og1gz]

@@magnuspitruzelli if you do go that way, be sure to keep in mind that nitric acid, is a very strong acid.

[@richardnicklin5849]

Quite fascinating process thanks dude.

[@Subgunman]

I just saw how you modified the garden cart from one to two wheels! Very nice mod! Just refinished my cart sanding, converting rust and painting with epoxy. Now what I need is some Rhino Liner or similar coating to protect the inside from rock scratches. Can one use the urine in the rotary compost makers to kick up the nitrate level of the compost?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

It came with inflatable wheels .. which always go flat at inconvenient times, so i swapped them out for solid ones. If your more conventional compost is stalling and in need of a nitrogen boost, Urine can give it that 'Push' to get it started up again.

[@Jackfirecracker]

Also - to visually show you got nitrate without making the controversial black powder, you can mix nitrate with sugar. Sugar/nitrate is a common mixture for DIY smoke bombs. Once a friend accidently lit it on fire while we were mixing a bunch. The whole neighborhood got smoked out...

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

The fourth video in the series (links in description) is a livestream where I did just that - we used to repack our rocket motors against Estes' recommendations back when I was a sprout 😁

[@loombahour8568]

Does this get me pure potassium nitrate or is there still sodium nitrate and other nitrates in there? If not, how do you extract the potassium nitrate?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

You will likely still have tons of impurities (I did) after your first set of crystals form. To the best of my knowledge, the old folks just kept dissolving and re crystalizing batches until most were removed .. but if you want pure nitrate, one should start with natural gas .. and synthesize it. For fertilizer, one doesn't even need to do this much - just use the black earth like 10-10-10 that you didn't have to pay for.

[@tommylee6150]

How to change the water for soaking soil at 6:50? Do I need to filter out the water and then pour new hot water to soak the soil again?

[@utopia4544]

You are a man loves your country and is proud of your country's history

[@geoffreycasey875]

Loved the sound of the train.. from Dublin Ireland ☘️🇮🇪👍

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

We have one going by every few hours during the day!

[@hopefilledsinner3911]

Very cool thankyou. I was more interested in the nitrate crystals myself and thinking it would be nice to run the lay process naturally in some sort of solar still and an abundance of time.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Taking time to allow the water to evaporate out would definitely have been preferable.

[@Enjoy.The.Decline]

Also... the "instructions" you refer too, so often.. where can one find these? Would love to print them up for keepsakes

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

The Foxfire series of books include the old Appalachian community method in volume five - Conte's paper maybe searchable, but perhaps not with your country's *erm* restrictions. Last time I tried looking in the US, I was able to find it - but that can always change. Nitrate is so important to so many aspects of our technology tree that loosing the knowledge of how to make it would be a serious consequence of any major cataclysm. Preserving that knowledge is a purely humanitarian effort. Make Good Choices, People!

[@country4lyfe365]

I'd like your advice. Right before I planted my garden. Tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, green beans , I tilled under 4 bails of straw , bags of leaves, then planted. Everything looked like it was takeing off great then it looked like it was all dieing. Yellow leaf, bloomed way too early. Then it took back off after 3 weeks. I now have 6ft tomatoes. But cabbage got ah bunch of holes in the leaves and only headed the size of baseballs. But everything else " after looking like it died" came back. Was thee composting material cooking my roots . Idk. I'm just curious.last year I didnt do any of this and I had the best garden ever. Thank you. Great video. Love your channel. God bless. Indiana.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

When doing compost in place, always make sure to be doing the composting ABOVE the root zone of whatever you are growing. Available nitrogen will drop at some point during decomposition, then be released as the microbes using it end their life cycles - time released fertility, if the water can carry it down to the root zone, but a potential disruption if the plant's roots are trying to grow through the decomposing material

[@got2kittys]

It's a good practice to incorporate that sort of material in the Fall, and allow it to winter over. Or compost it, for direct use in the Spring. Your plants don't enjoy competing with the soil bacteria.

[@LOFHOBL]

I give you so much credit for teaching us how to create such an important resource using earth. Our government 100% DOES NOT want us to know how to do that. Also to stick it out and commit to doing this for a full year, that's awesome man. I'm wondering did you store that barrel inside the house the entire year where it could stay a perfect temperature or did it stay outside with fluctuating temps? Something tells me this could play a huge part in decomposition and potency. 🤔

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

It was outside, and the temperature dropping over winter factored into the length of time necessary for decomposition - in the tropics, this goes much, MUCH faster. Great Question, btw!

[@robertlombardo8437]

Question. I have a whole plastic garbage bin full of straw in my back yard. I have been feeding it a fairly steady stream of urine (I'm also a trucker, one who leaves home for two weeks at a time.) But the problem is, I can't tell if it's working or not. I didn't poke any holes in the bottom because I didn't want to lose any of the moisture and I also put a lid on top. Do you think this will negatively affect the process at all? The straw level does seem to be sinking down a little, but again, I can't see the bottom, so I can't tell.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

It should be working .. a bit slower due to the cold, but straw breaks down pretty quick.

[@robertlombardo8437]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry Okay. I'm also living in the desert where it can reach 120F so I'm looking forward to the summer. The cold won't last forever! 😏

[@careyjamesmajeski3203]

Super cool. That’s an insane amount of work for less than two grams of nitrate. As far as gardening is concerned, this makes no sense. It’s much easier to just use the compost directly. But if you needed to make an explosion, I see how useful this is. Thanks!

[@careyjamesmajeski3203]

Just got to the end of the video, and you just made the same point. :) cheers!

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Its amazing how many people watch these videos wanting to know when I'm going to show how to make black powder - and I might, if there was a compelling gardening related reason to (bursting charge for a cloud seeding rocket, maybe? That's a stretch!) In the end, I just burned it up during my next livestream, and fed the rest of the compost to my tomatoes. 😊

[@latemanparodius5133]

Another thing to keep in mind is that he didn't process all of that black earth into isolated nitrate.

[@careyjamesmajeski3203]

@@latemanparodius5133 that wouldn’t reduce the amount of work.

[@latemanparodius5133]

@@careyjamesmajeski3203 It wouldn't, but the work could be done in larger batches than just a quart jar at a time. That would come with its own challenges, though.

[@asstronix6657]

Waited so long for this! This is awsome! Tomatoes Will rising high with that! 🍅🍅🍅 I am now a little Samen 🌟 thx for the inspiration

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

I sure hope so .. I put the end product on one row of tomatoes only, so there will be another way to measure how well the fertilizer works 😊

[@paulbraga4460]

absolutely wonderful series even if i would not use it for my tomatoes. for my lettuce, yes...blessings to all

[@Sacrificial_Mind]

I really appreciated this video series, thanks for taking the time to make it and share your knowledge. Could you help me understand the chemical reactions more? So bacteria breaks down the urea or the proteins in the urine? And turns them into ammonia, and then other bacteria breakdown the ammonia to nitrate? Is the byproduct of the ammonia breakdown potassium nitrate or is there another step where the nitrogen mixes with the potassium in the wood chips? When you leached the from the wood chips , boiled it down, and mixed it with wood ash, was it really the carbon that removed the containments opposed to the calcium carbonate? Or is there a reaction there with the calcium carbonate? Also the potassium carbonate and potassium hydroxide in the ash - do they play any role in the potassium nitrate production? Really appreciate your help! Chemistry is new topic for me and I found the whole proceas fascinating when I tried to understand what components of the materials were reacting with one another specifically.

[@earlmiller6093]

Dude…. I’m not a gardener… but this was very interesting. I am a black powder enthusiast tho😊… thank you for sharing!!!

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

It just so happens that a well supplied gardener has everything he needs to feed a smoke pole .. short the shot (but if you're growing our cannas, they could do for a buckshot in a pinch!) I love taking it out to the range, spending pennies on shooting all day, just for the sheer fun of it. Its hard to feel the joy with the other toys, given the cost of feeding them these days!

[@seymourpro6097]

In the early days of black powder ALL the nitrate was made this way. All the waste from humans and farm animals was collected in manure heaps and the rain leached the nitrates out over a year or so. Nitrate by Haber process or by Birkeland-Eyde process comes only as Black Powder use in war and guns was decreasing. The chemical process of nitrogen fixation (as opposed to the bio process) facilitated the production of nitric acid and the nitration process which that facilitated, leading to all the nitro explosives we hear of today. In the early days the government would send teams out to harvest nitrate from muckheaps leaving the farmers with only enough nitrate to grow poor crops. Now farms buy in nitrate fertiliser to increase crop yields

[@extra2042]

Is it possible for you to link to the source you used on how to produce the potassium nitrate crystals? And if you were to complete this process again, what would you do differently to get a better final result.

[@Jackfirecracker]

Just found this series today - super interesting. Great job! The year-plus commitment is impressive.

[@jackjones9460]

Have you considered keeping chickens for a plentiful source or nitrates?

[@Minuteman.Express]

Happy gardeners

[@andeasdonovan9691]

Is it possible to kno3 using urea as your proces ? Instead of pouring pee to supply ammonia, we will directly use urea as ammonia supply.??? What do you think? Cant we boost it like this way.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

The soil microbes convert the urea in urine to nitrite then to nitrate - they do the same with urea fertilizers, even if the urea in them came from processing natural gas instead of from the bladder of an animal .. so if you have a lot of urea, you're set. Pee just has an advantage in that it is free .. and we all make just enough of it every year to feed ourselves, if we used it

[@andeasdonovan9691]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry Can u make a separate video on that topic ? By the way, please try to edit your videos; it's very very long. I have idea; you used pee to make kno3; you poured pee alot of times and waited till the bacteria does the job. The job of bacteria is to simply convert the nitrogen into ..... ..... so we have nitrate. But what if we boost the bacteria population and give them direct food instead of pee ? Here we will be using urea; because its a great source of nitrogen. Can you please make a video on this topic. I am expecting to make kno3 in between week or month, by this method !!. Because we will boosting bacteria and food bacteria(nitrogen). After watching serval videos on nitrogen fixation , soil and bacteria. I knewed that; nitrogen first converts to ammonia then nitrate by two different bacteria. And they avoid oxygen. And release hydrogen in atmosphere. Pls make a video on fastest way to make kno3 using urea bed. Use urea instead of pee; populate bacteria.

[@ravenmoon1165]

If you just wanted to use the soil, how much non treated soil would you mix to not burn your plants?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Treat it like bagged fertilizer - one gallon should be enough to cover 500 square feet, or side dress with a couple of handfuls per planting.

[@qualqui]

This is COOL, you just made your own home made Organic Fertilizer from that rich compost, I was thinking this was something similar to what some folks call 'compost tea' but it isn't. I bet them tomatoes are gonna get such a boost, Mary and you will have an abundance of homegrown, yummy 'maters! :D

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Speaking of, I need to get started dehydrating some tomatoes ..

[@johnmace6355]

Dumb question from someone new to composting and attempting to make potassium nitrate rich soil. Could grass clippings be used in conjunction with or as a substitutes to leaf debris if I don’t have a lot of trees in my property?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

YES. the first time I did this, I used hay cut from the field nearby. The compost finished within 6 months, and was the blackest dirt that I had ever seen .. the decision to use arborist chips this time around was partly influenced by a desire for more micronutrients in the compost, since it was always intended to be used as fertilizer.

[@johnfajer7691]

How does the fertilizer work on the plants?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

When a plant senses nitrate in the rhizosphere, it stimulates the production of growth hormones.

[@johnfajer7691]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry Thank you!

[@jamesferguson536]

Insulate your barrel and you'll get better decomposition of your material throughout the barrel. That is why you got your best decomp in the middle of the barrel.

[@robertlombardo8437]

Could you explain that please? Why would I do that? Because I have actually put a lid on top of my barrel, which is just a plastic garbage bin I got at the hardware store. I did that to retain the moisture and urine content.

[@sirtango1]

@@robertlombardo8437 not the original poster, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer. Decomposition produces heat. In the center is where you will have the most heat due to the material on the outer edges, top and bottom, acting as insulation from the colder temperatures outside. The warmer the temperatures the better the decomposition of your material.

[@dinadaughtry8993]

Like to see how to make lye from ash be useful for making soap from scratch and it is also a very powerful degreaser just have to be very careful with it because it will couse coustic burns if it gets on your skin

[@glenngreener9914]

Nice work! It would have been interesting to see how much you would have gotten from the whole barrel.

[@ivanyurkinov]

it started out as a full container and breaks down.

[@kriskringle913]

Can you use any mulch from trees, or only leaves and woodchips, grass turns to straw when dried, so you could use that too?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Woodchip mulch (whole trees) is best for Fertilizer with more available calcium, phosphorous, and potassium - it also takes the longest to decompose. Second best is leaves, and those will decompose within 6-9 months. Grasses of all kinds decompose quickly, but will provide fewer nutrients (aside from nitrogen).

[@MediumStare]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry how long would grass take?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

@@MediumStare Under 3 months, and usually much quicker.

[@robertyoung5748]

You did it you really did it.

[@ncktbs]

i can only imigine everyone involved in this must have felt like an alchemist

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

A bit, yeah 😊 "Mad Scientist at Work!"

[@ryanhelmbold2288]

Can you use the entire nitrate for gunpowder or do you have to seperate it into sodium or potassium nitrate? And if so how do you do that?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

After re-dissolving and recrystallizing a few more times, the product should be pure enough to use as an oxidizer - good enough to make cloud seeding rockets for survival gardening purposes, for example (but right now, (in the USA) you need an FAA waiver to launch a home made rocket. The permissions are easy enough to obtain, albeit a bit officious. Different countries have different rules, so make sure that you aren't going to get in more trouble than you can handle before trying anything 😁🚀🌧)

[@paperburn]

@@Green.Country.AgroforestryRockets are classified by the Federal Aviation Administration into three classes. For launching Class 1 model rockets, you don’t need additional permission from the FAA. If your rocket is classified as a class 2 high-power rocket, you need an FAA waiver. Finally, the local government may require you to get additional authorization.

[@felsinferguson1125]

Just found this set of vids, and I've got an "I wonder if...?" type question on improving either yield, process time (as in, "shorten it") or both. Are you familiar with the concept of freeze-distillation? Such as what's used in the making of "applejack"? (Not the kiddie-cereal...) As a "short form" explanation in case you're not, one makes applejack by fermenting apple cider to get (depending on where you are and local linguistic variations) "hard cider" or "apple beer", then freezing it. Unless you've got a super-duper-antarctica-in-a-box grade deep freeze, you'll end up with a container of apple-flavored alcoholic slush, a lot like a Slurpee. Run the slush through a strainer about as fine as window screen, retaining whatever liquid comes off it, and tossing the ice as waste, then freeze the liquid again - lather, rinse, repeat as desired. Each freeze-strain cycle gets rid of water, leaving you with higher and higher alcohol content, until you end up with a form of booze that's hard to distinguish from traditionally distilled apple brandy. Depending on when you stop the cycle, you end up with a "you pick it" (by deciding when to stop repeating the cycle) percentage of alcohol. With enough repetitions of the freeze/strain cycle, it's possible to get into the 180-190 proof (90-95% alcohol by volume) range before you get to the point where you just can't freeze it at all anymore. (unless you've got a deep-freeze that can get down to -173F, in which case, you can make yourself a solid chunk of alcohol - but that's not exactly within the range of your typical home freezer...) With that in mind, what, if anything, would you think might be the result of freeze-distilling the urine feedstock prior to adding it to the barrel of organics, the same way you'd do a batch of applejack, to get "concentrated urine"? It seems realistic to me to expect that you could also cause at least some of the salt that tends to kill bacteria to precipitate out as part of the process - which would have the side-benefit of increasing your population of microbes, thus increasing the speed at which they accomplish their task of turning the urea into nitrates. Thoughts?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

I hadn't thought of freeze distillation for refinement, but that sounds feasible, or at least worth attempting, if one wants to further refine their nitrate for medicinal or food preservation purposes. For use as fertilizer, it isn't even necessary to do this much refinement - just side dress with the nitrified earth!

[@manifestgrandmanifestations]

Hi, I wonder I you could harvest more electricity from that dirt compared to regular dirt ??? Let me know please as I am in the city waaaa. Thank you much love from Las Vegas Nevada US

[@sladorswannam9617]

Just pee into a bottle container and let it stay for some weeks and you will see the white thing form in the bottle. But I'm not sure that is the potassium nitrate or something else. I say that because I saw people removing salt petre out of animals waste so we are animals too it would be just the same.

[@MexviRumsey]

hi, I don't understand you, can you please write along with the order?

[@prospectorpete]

Instead of waiting a year .could you use cow poo instead which is full of nitrogen

[@prospectorpete]

@@skr9 huh ?

[@Badger.07]

Is there a way you could extract the salt or is there an easier way

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

You could send your sample to the local ag extension lab for an assay .. depending on your location, the service is cheap, or even free. I just thought that finding out my nitrogen % with a little back yard chemistry would be fun 😁

[@corvusmusik8776]

When everyone watching a movie where the tracker tastes the shit on the ground or blood on leaves while tracking wonders who the f would ACTUALLY put some random nasty in their mouth: THIS GUY LOL

[@Janderra]

Very interesting process 🐸 Go Team Aquarius! 🥰 Blessings Gerowyn

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Thank you 🤗

[@joebird1400]

How would sawdust say from Pine work as a nitrate with urine

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

A year ago, I would be hesitant to recommend it .. but one of our viewers has since started using pine bedding pellets layered with urine, and informs me that it is breaking down even faster than the wood chips that I was using - more surface area.

[@appaho9tel]

Nice Acorn grill!

[@charles.6691]

One liter of fertilizer makes two grams of potassium nitrate, so you can ferment a total of 200 grams in your barrel?

[@charles.6691]

Because your bucket is about 200 L, but now it only has half of the waste, about 100 L.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

I had to think about it for a minute, but yes, that's just about right. I'm mixing imperial and metric measurements - but a quart and a liter are fairly close in volume. I found that it is easier to absorb urea into wood chips than straw - straw will completely decompose quickly, and leaves some very nice black dirt, but wont be able to hold quite as much as the wood .. but you can use straw, hay, grass clippings, dead leaves, shredded paper, ect.

[@mercenery1232]

Two to 3 shot of gunpowder from all that work.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

and that is why the old folks back in Appalachia would get together and make a party out of the chore - it is easier to reach critical saturation the more black dirt is being processed, and easier to do all of that processing with extra hands. Off screen, I added sufficient nitrate from my existing stores to reach critical saturation .. then subtracted the amount that I added to provide the yield that I reported - so in order to do this in a survival situation where you NEED to be able to produce nitrate for medicine, food preparation, industry and ordinance, just remember to scale everything up by at least 10x, and if the crystals aren't forming, you can always add more. Prepare to have everyone over for a 2-3 day weekend.

[@aresident7745]

good videos, awesome even. idk where you live bro but you should take care of your house before that turns to nice black soil too. good luck man

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

We have an old garage on the property that is either going to be crushed when the neighbor's Sycamore falls on it, or we get around to dismantling it (those windows would be good for a cold frame or two)

[@MegaKathem]

Do you think you would be able to extract the salt from sheep manure? I think it would be faster and easier . Good luck

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

It would be much easier to have large amounts of animal manure to work with - small farm scale has some big advantages over suburban backyard scale!

[@ljsavmech]

The plants behind it has grown quite a bit. 😂😂😂

[@Haryadfc]

My man thank you so much❤❤❤❤❤

[@scottyork8831]

There are a couple of steps through this that would be easier if you used a decanting rod. It will help prevent the solid matter from pouring out with the wadte water.

[@Blutnase]

This is the stuff they made us drink in boot camp.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

(allegedly) 😁 Happy Friday!

[@ljsavmech]

55 gallons of manure, 20 gallons of urine, one year to produce 2 grams of Potassium crystal 😂😂😂 but you get pounds of fertilizer 🤔 excellent work. Thank you for sharing.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Making purified nitrate this way is really a village pursuit .. lots of input to get a concentrated solution that will crystalize. I hid part of the process so that the overly eager but under disciplined would not succeed, but you could still get the idea of what was being done. Letting the black Earth work its way in as a top dressing delivers nitrogen more slowly than applying a liquid fertilizer, and since the plants only ever use a tiny portion of available nitrogen anyway, it is better to let it be released slowly. I suppose, if I ever needed to build cloud seeding rockets, we could do it in a pinch .. I always loved model rocketry as a kid :)

[@ljsavmech]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry You are a master instructor indeed. Thank you. 😂😂overly eager and less disciplined 🫡 awesome description.

[@emanwe01]

Bear in mind that those few grams came from a one-quart sample of the nitrified earth, not from the full 55 gallon barrel.

[@jpac2g]

Thank you

[@mickwolf1077]

at 20:00 theres a L4D safehouse symbol in the background :)

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

That building is one of my great disappointments .. the people that use it only use it on the first day of every week, and they completely ignore the teachings of Rabbi Yashua Bar Yosef. Instead, they follow the teachings of the Pharisee, Saul. Saul claimed to hear the teaching of Yashua from beyond the grave, but if anyone were to study, they would know: The dead are dead, and know nothing. That Saul had some access to Yashua's teachings is not in dispute - he had ample opportunity to pick up a few gems while he was isolating and executing followers of Jesus .. and you were just talking about a video game, weren't you?

[@mickwolf1077]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry oh wow, yes I was talking about a video game, I didn't realise that.

[@theuniversaleye9780]

If I get container like u with one year process how much pottasium nitrate will I get? Sorry if my English bad, but I really wanna kn

[@Angrycapitalist]

I believe you can further refine the potassium nitrate by crystalizing it; heat it up and let the liquid evaporate by about half Remove the crystals, add more hot water to repeat and you can remove a lot of the (yellow/ brown) impurities

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Harder to do with a small quantity because there will always be some nitrate left behind with the impurities .. but if one were making nitrate for angina treatment, or food preservation, or even to make a propellant for a cloud seeding rocket - any number of good uses - that is a bit what the refinement process would look like

[@Angrycapitalist]

@@Green.Country.Agroforestry Yeah we'd have to really scale up volume in order to make that method effective

[@武装韭菜]

Part 4 ？

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

I believe the next live stream we did after this video, I mixed a teaspoon's worth of the crystals with a teaspoon of sugar, and lit them to demonstrate that those were actually nitrate crystals .. nice puff of smoke 😊🧙🏻‍♂️ On a backyard scale it is impractical to make purified nitrate this way - in pioneer days, whole communities would bring all of their black earth together, and process the stuff in huge batches, save the leachate and concentrate it for the next batch and so on. Fortunately for gardeners, the amount that you get is almost exactly what you need for your vegetable garden, and one does not need to do anything with the black earth except add it as a top dressing, or work it in when preparing the soil in the spring.

[@lynnbarnesiii3905]

This also brings another great use of the wastewater in America

[@antoinecoursoldeschamps9349]

A men piss in wood chips and he want it back XD. Love the content watch the 3 videos and learn alot thank you

[@mikethecaveman90]

Much love xoxox

[@leefoster4133]

Could screen it and what didn't pass through add it to another batch. Not sure about the process as there are some better ways to refine it to a power. But the majority of it would be like you were saying/showing roughly just has to be refined a number of times and use of different filtering media would improve it. As far as the salts? I have no idea what to do with them. Am sure it can be refined but what you would do with Potassium chloride I wouldn't know. There is something in my back of my mind but I have forgotten what that is but there is a use for it. Whatever that is. I had to look it up to remember; Potassium chloride is potash, fertilizer. Odd because chloride to me is a poison when it breaks down. But something still bugs me as I keep thinking it can be used to make HCl which is an acid and the solid salt like material would be just potassium. As far as how to make black power; I did that when I was a lad. Just not from scratch.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

In the foxfire book, the process is described as something that an entire community would come together for, everyone bringing their nitrified earth, guano, whatever they had, and processing huge amounts all at once .. it takes quite a high concentration of nitrate in solution before crystals will form. From the rough crystals (which we got, yay!) one has to keep on dissolving, removing the solids and impurities, and re-crystalizing until the purity that you are looking for has been reached - there are other methods, if you have lab equipment and reagents to work with, but if you are obliged to make nitrate the old fashioned way it can still be done. For my purposes, I never have to do more than dump it out of the barrel, and spread it around my vegetable garden .. but should I ever need to build rockets for cloud seeding, I know where I can get half of the ingredients that I need for the fuel grain 😊

[@squirlboy250]

Try adding just enough water to dissolve the crystals and no more than that, then filter and evap the water.

[@skippy5506]

Really interesting stuff, long process but well worth it I bet 😁

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

I have reason to hope that the one row of tomatoes that received the compost will do better than the row that did not - and that is the other potency test, of course!

[@skippy5506]

I totally agree, they should do way better than the ones without. I’m excited to see the results 😁

[@jeffhuntley2921]

What does nitrate taste like?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Imagine salt, but it is missing something .. salt with softer edges, and a slight chemical aftertaste.

[@ClickinChicken]

nah nah nah, you whacked the soil bacteria when you did all that boiling!

[@maryistulsafox]

That was just to get the nitrates out he doesn't normally do that thank God it's a lot of work

[@Enjoy.The.Decline]

Awesome videos brother!!👊 very informative with your steps and like the small history lessons along the way. Love to learn.. Hope to see more in the future👊✌️

[@ClickinChicken]

Live action role play. Our buddy.. You're going to end with with a Tomato the size of a basketball!

[@MrTim3990]

Nice!!! What is quantity of wood ash per quart of earth.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

LeConte did not provide that information, so I just threw in about 1 1/2 pints .. the amount of ashes that I was able to sift from the charcoal making video. Is it too much, not enough .. I don't know! It lightened up the ley considerably though, which I had not anticipated. I suspect that less would work just as well.

[@timne0]

Hot break, not trub :) trub is what is left at the bottom

[@StuckCentrist]

I hit like for the humerus tee

[@Stormsniper01]

Now you can make corn beef.

[@WaschyNumber1]

🍅 Tomatoes 🤤

[@hydewhyte4364]

16:07 ... please tell me that's not roaches.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

That is a nitrate solution being reduced by the addition of heat. Insignificant organisms not being referred to in the narrative that may appear in the background are of no consequence. Happy?

[@workhardplayhard801]

Blackboard chalk is 100%ish pure calcium carbonate

[@graemewight2975]

Hiya, by lay do u mean Lye ? We say Lie. In Scotland likes. 👍🏻🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

The word was "Ley" - non-standard English, used in Appalachia instead of "Leachate", to indicate the substance derived from percolating a solvent through a solid. It most likely derived from an archaic form, and I suspect the word "Lye" shares a common root. Related is the word "Lee", or the waste solids left after leaching (or brewing, in more modern times). The mountain folk would refer to the mixture as a "Liquor" prior to separating the ley from the lees.

[@علیرضا-ش3ب2ع]

سلام چطور بسازم و چیه

[@improvisedsurvival5967]

All that work to get 2 grams. Gotta be a better way

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

The same work can be done with much more input, if one desires nitrate in quantity .. All I have need of is the nitrate as it is, in the composted wood chips, for fertilizer. The same method used to be used by entire communities, with wagon loads of nitrified earth - they made a weekend out of it .. probably broke out the shine and picked a little guitar while they were at it, too 😊

[@IntheBlood67]

Why am I thinking.......Composting Toilet?

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Composting a city's sewage is a bit -ewww .. the things that people flush shouldn't go on the garden - but a composting toilet where only organic material is processed, now that makes more sense.

[@Friedrich-Wilhelm-1980]

cant you just use limestone its baring the odd contaminate completely calcium carbonate

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

After heating the limestone to produce lime, you could substitute slaked lime at %50 by mass to get a similar result .. but next time, I'm just going to send a sample to the OSU lab and have them assay it for me .. less work on my part!

[@jessiejackson8502]

But can you smoke it!? Lol, sry... jk! 🤦🏼‍♂️ Great info, and much appreciated!

[@WaschyNumber1]

🖖 👍

[@VonFowler-fw3yh]

That's funny

[@whiskeytangofoxtrot575]

Yeah, I think your better off with a bow and arrow

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Planting mulberry trees, and hanging rat traps on the trunks .. quiet way to get a steady supply of squirrel meat. The berries are tasty too 😁

[@KC-nd7nt]

Not embarrassed by your property huh ? Id be mortified.

[@Green.Country.Agroforestry]

Not even remotely. in 2016, the front yard was a mess of assorted weeds and sticker grass .. now it is a constantly improving food forest. Within a similar span of time, the defunct garage will come down, and the blocks in its walls will become part of a new retaining wall. In another span, the trees that I plant along that wall will screen the neighbor's derelict buildings from view. Pride is a silly emotion, and is as useful as mortification - but if I indulged, I would certainly be proud of my accomplishments with this property thus far. Don't allow embarrassment over what you have, or don't have prevent you from making constant improvements!

[@TheDaken]

look at the roaches in the background of that kitchen

[@TEXAS-SMITH]

Funky McNasty you like them bugs huh?