Tons of work got done during the 3 weeks there, including:
- Took down and partly processed 6 very large cypress trees above the tea field
- Started new long-term compost pile
- Planted several dozen new tea plants, mostly Y/Y cultivars
- Lots of wood moving and splitting
- Re-built the char pit with real firebrick, which should last forever
- Several burns of the char pit.
Lots of thinking about how to make the process easier, mostly in the sifting-crushing-sorting. Right now i am thinking about building a low-tech Rotary Sifter, something like this. Combined with some kind of crushing phase, with gravity to assist in moving char through the process, i think this would radically increase the amount of finished fine char per hour of work.
Update: it turns out that what i’d like to build is called a Trommel.