I recently moved my fire pit down to the new homestead and I may do a

celebratory bonfire here with some of the scraps that I have from the old place and that kind of brings you to the question

what if anything can you do with the wood ash that's left in your fire pit after you have a nice little bonfire with your family or friends.

Can you actually do something with that in the garden?

And the answer is, of course, yes.

Now, first of all, just a little disclaimer, you don't want to use ash from treated wood from

anything that may be in there that is being out of plastic or metals so use your

best judgment here you don't want to use ash from charcoal.

If you burn a lot of random trash, I mean, hopefully we're not doing that in our backyard.

But if you are, then that is not the type of ash that you want to use.

You want to use straight up wood ash. So if you have

that, what does it actually contain? Well, wood ash contains a lot of potassium and a lot of

calcium as well as magnesium and phosphorus, copper, and zinc.

It has quite a bit of calcium like I mentioned and so it can increase the pH of soil. So it will make your soil more alkaline

if that's something that you need as in raising the pH. So if you were to add it into a

pH of six soil it's going to bring it to a number that is above six.

So you need to make sure that you test your soil before you do that so you know you're not making

it some sort of massive adjustment up in the pH scale to get it to more

alkaline soil which again most annual fruits and vegetables do not want a

hyper alkaline soil like somewhere under seven, which is pH neutral, they would prefer that.

So is it a good idea?

Well, yes, it is, and in small amounts, I wouldn't be concerned about process and technique. I would probably just toss a little

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