Our biochar park Hiilipuisto trees monitored for 2024 and recent presentations on biochars research

 In September our work has been presented in several national events in Finland, starting with the biochar webinar of The Finnish Association of Landscape Industries (Viherympäristöliitto) on 5th of September. Priit presented there latest updates of biochar research on Finnish agricultural fields as well as on urban trees globally- but of course also the latest information from our #HiiliPuisto, CarbonPark project. As of autumn 2023,  the trees growing in biochar growing media were doing better than the ones in control. Now in this week, we visited the park again with our dream team (Dr. Anu Riikonen and visiting students from UniLaSalle, France: Philibert Henniaux and Guilhem Franque), and recorded both the circumference and height data, but also conducted assessment of general tree vigor and the inclination of them. We were amazed by the rapid growth since last year, some trees had increased the girth by about 5 cm in a single year! We'll soon plot and analyze the results and finalize the report of first five years of the tree growth. Furthermore, yesterday we were happy to present our Hiilipuisto urban test area to 35 horticulture students from Lepaa, Häme University of Applied Sciences, led by Kirsi Mäkinen. These students were also happy to try out some of the measurements on trees and asked many brilliant questions about biochar and urban tree research in general.

Another recent presentation of our (and also general general Nordic) biochar research especially in farm context was held on 12 September in Iisalmi, by Ylä-Savo Vocational College recycling economy project (https://kiertotaloudella.fi/ymparistovastuullisuus/). It was a nice event offering presentations and live demos on different farm-scale pyrolysis units (both batch and continuous devices by PUHI and SoilCare). We were happy on the many lively discussions and collaborations we made, among others, greenhouse gas researchers from LUKE Maaninka station and Olvi company! The presentations included also latest studies from the Nordics on use of biochar as feed supplement as well as addition to liquid manure tanks- but also on the economics of pyrolysis devices on farm scale and the latest updates from Finnish Biochar Network (part of Bioenergia ry) project on biochar classification in Finnish context. The talks will be available soon from the project website!

Celebrating harvest 2024 of our long-term biochar experiments in Helsinki!

 This week our team worked hard to sample the yield component samples and harvest the plot yields of our long-term biochar experiments in Helsinki. 

As the growing season in Helsinki was very dry, the moisture retention capacity of differently activated biochars had excellent chances to be tested. Indeed, there seemed to be promising results on yield formation, but we can tell more only after full yield component analysis as well as statistical testing. This data is part of doctoral thesis of Samuel Amoah, and we're grateful for all the team members participating this season in field experiments! A shout out to Karel Bartoš, Faiza Enam Binte, Dilruba Yasmin, Kira Eskelinen, Zannatul Ferdous, Cecilia Renvall,  Jasmi Näsäkkälä and Laura Parvila! Next, we're getting into lab analysis!

The traditional AgriChar harvest party occurred this year just few hours after we got the samples to dryer and it coincided with the end of the research visit of Lii Lopp from University of Tartu. Thank you so much Lii for your time with us, we will miss you and look forward to future collaboration!