The Andersons HumiChar Organic Soil Builder

Where do you get it? #

• The Andersons HumiChar Organic Soil Builder with Humic Acid and Biochar, 40 lbs. (up to 40,000 sq. ft.)
  

Why should you buy it? #

HumiChar organic soil builder treatment is not a fertilizer. It is a soil amendment to improve your soil. All the fertilizer you are putting down is for the soil which then feeds the grass. You are trying to improve the soil with this one and this is a combination of Humic Acid and Biochar (carbon). Without doing soil treatment you are at the mercy of whatever dirt your home builder put down before they laid down your grass sod.

Bermuda grass naturally improves soil over time through root cycling. Over time healthy bermuda grass will nourish the soil naturally. All the dead grass and roots return to the soil over time as they decompose into your lawn. HumiChar is a great supplement for your soil for when you don’t have the best soil.

This looks expensive at first glance but one 40 lb bag can cover 40,000 sq ft! It will not do anything noticeable to your grass like greening it, only fertilizer does that. This is to improve the soil you can use less fertilizer and water over time saving you a lot of money. Added bonus, the Biochar (carbon) portion of this that you put down is permanent! Your soil will always have the benefit of having this so you will be putting down several light treatments of HumiChar every year which will just compound the carbon in the root layer of the soil giving you better and better grass each year.

HumiChar is better than other Biochar from other brands due to the way it penetrates the soil. The goal with HumiChar is to get it down the root level quickly where it can benefit your grass:

CAUTION: HumiChar is not charged. It is composed of 70% Humic Acid and 30% BioChar only. It needs an organic material to charge/activate it. If you spread HumiChar on your soil by itself without charging it, it will suck up all the nutrients, moisture, and microbes in your soil like a sponge and then slowly release it back out. This is not what you want. You want to mix HumiChar with an organic material so it is “pre-charged” before you put it down on your soil. You can mix compost in with Humichar which will help activate it.

There are other ways to activate Biochar based products but they are a bit difficult for the residential suburban do it yourself world. You can do these if you live in a more rural area and have access to livestock:

• Incorporate into a mix of biochar, worm castings, garden compost, organic fertilizer and water. You can also add urine, liquid fertilizers or animal manure that has aged. The resulting mix can be applied to soil in as few as two to three days.
• Digging biochar into an active compost pile. This takes a longer period for the microbial activity to take place, anywhere from weeks to months, depending on conditions of climate and quality of composting components. Here, care is needed though to ensure any manure in the compost used to charge biochar is devoid of antibiotics, insecticides, fungicides or disease-causing pathogens (micro-organisms), as the potential exists for these to be transferred to the soil. Similarly, harmful pollutants commonly found in degraded urban soils have the potential to be introduced into the composting organic/biochar matter.
• Mix raw biochar into livestock bedding, chicken coops and the like. The animals will urinate and defecate and their movements will combine the matter. This process will take longer depending on animal density and the size of the enclosures. As with the previous method, it is important not to introduce chemicals that may be present in animal medications or antibiotics or feed supplements.
• Using commercially available compounds of concentrated nutrients and micro-organisms, which are mixed with raw biochar. The specifically designed and formulated mixtures represent the optimum method of activation, in terms of compound and nutrients derived from naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals.

How do you use it? #

HumiChar will arrive in a bag like this:

It can be used on any soil for grass, flowers, vegetables, etc. There is nothing harmful in it. Here is more information on recommended amounts to put down depending on what you are wanting to grow:

Here are the recommended spreader settings. The best time to put down a soil amendment is right after your aerate so you can get it down to the root zone even quicker. Remember to add compost afterward so it activates the HumiChar: