The countdown is on! In just over a month, on 1^st September, we’re launching our new biochar garden soil booster via our online shop. Sacred Earth’s Biochar Soil Booster is designed to improve soil fertility and water retention, and so improve plant health and crop yields. It comes in compostable packaging and costs £9.99 for 3kg.

The super strong soil amendment is an artisan product that can be dug directly into soil or added to compost. Lovingly made by hand in small batches on our beautiful 40-acre site, it meets the highest eco-friendly standards. Our woodlands are managed using the age-old pruning techniques of coppicing and pollarding – which are environmentally regenerative, rather than just sustainable, because they boost further tree growth. The arising wood offcuts are baked at low temperatures in the on-site kiln to make biochar. It’s then ground by hand and blended with a unique recipe of soil-enriching ingredients: comfrey tea, worm casts, seaweed and biodynamic compost preparations.

Sacred Earth’s Biochar Soil Booster is a live product, bursting with the fungi and beneficial bacteria essential to soil health – unlike most commercially-available soil amendments and composts, which have been pasteurised at a high heat, a process which kills off all micro-organisms. This means it should be used within two weeks of purchase.

We’re launching this product because we want to get the word out about the soil crisis that’s unfolding right beneath our feet – and how we think biochar represents one way of curbing it. Soil health is a critical issue that we all need to be concerned about. Research from the United Nations shows that a third of all soil on our planet is ‘acutely degraded’.

Healthy soil needs looking after. It’s essential to create a good environment for the mycorrhizal fungi and other micro-organisms that increase plant root mass and so allow them to take up more water and nutrients. The application of biochar is an easy way to do this, as you only need to do it once. It has the added environmental benefit of locking in carbon and so helping with CO2 emissions too.

Soil health tends to be worse on farmlands than in domestic gardens, due to the overuse of fertilisers and pesticides – as well as the persistent planting of monocultures. But much garden soil is unhealthy too, because compost hasn’t been added, weed killer has been applied or it simply hasn’t been tended carefully enough. Microbial ecosystems can take time to rejuvenate, however, so please don’t expect immediate results. The addition of biochar is a long-term solution to soil infertility, so its benefits might not be apparent until a year or so after it’s been applied.

Sacred Earth will be celebrating the launch of its Biochar Soil Booster with a hands-on workshop on how to make biochar led by Phil Greenwood. It will take place on Saturday 1 September from 10.30am until 4pm on the Sacred Earth site, near the village of Horam, East Sussex. It costs £60, including lunch and a sample of Sacred Earth’s Biochar Soil Booster. Please find more info here.