Ugandan farmers are turning bamboo smoke into an organic fertiliser and pesticide that boosts vegetable yields and replaces expensive pesticides.
Bamboo liquid smoke diluted in water has been shown to be the most superior wood vinegar capable of increasing vegetable growth and production by 20.2 per cent while cutting pesticide use by half.
The vinegar is made by ‘cooking’ bamboo in airless jikos. It naturally eliminates major pests for African farmers, such as fruit flies, termites, aphids, and mites, as well as fungal and bacterial infection.
The amber-coloured vinegar is a natural acid with a pH of 2.8-3 made by capturing the liquid smoke that comes out during the charcoal production process.
“To make the bamboo wood vinegar we cut, and sun-dry bamboo stalks for one week. Just like you would do with charcoal production we put the bamboo stalks into a portable metallic kiln, traditional kilns made from soil can also be used for five to seven hours. This kiln is fitted with a pipe that captures the smoke removed from the bamboo carbonisation process as condensed wood vinegar,” explained Violet Nasiche, a farmer in Northern Uganda.
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Up to 10 litres of vinegar can be harvested from 50kg of bamboo wood.
The charcoal that remains, which is 25 per cent of the initial bamboo, can be used as ready-to-use hot and quick-to-burn charcoal or crushed to make biochar.
Violet explained that the vinegar is very concentrated and cannot be fed directly to the plants so it is diluted at various rates depending on what it will be used for.“
To use as a foliar fertiliser applied on mature plants it is diluted at a rate of one part of bamboo vinegar for 500-700 parts of water every two weeks. For root irrigation a ratio of 1: 500 is used. For seedlings, it is diluted at a 1: 800-1000 ratio as a leaf spray or for root irrigation. To fight pests and diseases, a 1: 300-500 leaf application ratio is recommended,” she illuminated
The wood vinegar can also be used to as a soil disinfectant applied at a 1:100 ratio and directly sprayed on affected soil.
In fruit flies, pure bamboo vinegar has the same killin rate as commercial insecticide. It has a 100 per cent kill rate on termites and an over 90 per cent kill rate on aphids and mites. Wood vinegar also repels snails and slugs, nematodes from vegetables. It also reduces late-wilt and rots by 88.7 and 72.8 respectively.
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“The kale and onions in my vegetable garden are currently farmed without using a drop of pesticides and if you look at them, they are entirely free of pesticides. The wood vinegar also improves their root nutrient absorption while strengthening their roots and leaves which minimises fertiliser use,” Violet said.
Pic Courtesy: ECHOcommunity.org