If you make compost you can sprinkle it in as you build layers. Just kinda a way to use it up. In addition to being alkaline i think they bring alot of potassium to the table.

"But it's carbon, and it's free. ...and our soils are alkaline."

Wood ash, if it's really cooked down to "ashes", can be up to 40 or 50 percent calcium carbonate (caliche!) and/or calcium oxide, not such a good thing to add to alkaline dirt. I don't think you can count on calcium to leach out; the caliche doesn't, it just moves glacially down to a drier level.

Ash isn't toxic per se, just unbalancing in the direction opposite to the way you want to go. Bury it somewhere in a spot where pH is irrelevant, and mother nature will deal with it just fine.

Well, of course it isn't "toxic" as in "deadly poisonous" but I hereby declare it "toxic waste" around here (in the sense that as a strong alkaline additive it doesn't help my alkaline soil) and will bury it in a safe place where it can lye (heh) undisturbed. As noted, with my soil sitting on top of caliche, I sure don't need extra calcium in it.

A little bit put into a compost heap probably wouldn't cause a problem but I wouldn't add a lot. Unless I am mistaken wood ash can be used to make soap ...

Afirefly, I was thinking about the soap thing too. I remember my great grandmother making soap out of ashes and lard. She also boiled clothes to get them really clean (according to her :-) in a big iron caldrun over a wood fire. But I don't think many of us are up to that, whether we have ashes available or not.

This post was edited by roselee on Fri, Jan 16, 15 at 23:38