wide eyed and legless said:
Not a good idea to use it as a garden mulch, the breakdown of the carbon silica will take years plus as there is so much rice in with the husks it will attract vermin, best thing to do with it is to either make a bio-char with it or just burn it and mix the ash with manure to keep the pH stable in your soil.
Appreciate you concern and know your feedback was probably done in good spirit. My interest in gardening started at about 5 years of age and in nice rich volcanic Auckland soils. Have managed to create fertile soils in Perth and Central Coast sand, Sydney rock and clay, Brisbane ...to be fair, pretty good alluvial soil and lets never speak of Adelaide.
Been doing a fair amount of research on different mulch options. Sugar cane is now prohibitively expensive when you need 50 bales at a time! Straw has too many weeds. We already chip and use 95% of the wood off both the properties.
I am aware of the Silica content (must admit carbon silica has me stumped?), however rice hulls in various forms have been used for hundreds of years in farming an are used commercially in some places. Biggest drawback is weight, if windy they can tend to fly around. Easiest thing to do is mix in some sand. I'm planning to use in a bend with heavier material
It's going on heavy clay soils and not being mixed in, should be ideal. PH is manageable
I'm not getting into the biochar debate, however building a charcoal oven (equivalent) is suburban Sydney is probably not going to set me up well with the neighbours and on a 1500sqm block vermin aren't a problem. Well except the bloody rabbits which keeps the dog fit.
Keep you posted on the experiment
