Charcoal-Making for Household Resilience Workshop – Centre for Ecological Learning

When: Sunday 22 March, 9am – 3pm
Bring: a hat, gloves, lunch
Where: Northbank Community Garden
Cost: $60, includes morning tea
Contact: Zoe on 0400 665 8100400 665 810 or info@cel.org.au

Charcoal boils a kettle as fast as gas, is smokeless and doesn’t make your pots and pans sooty. Managed correctly, charcoal as a cooking fuel can be an environmentally sustainable and inexpensive fuel to complement your everyday cooking. Cooking with homemade charcoal can take domestic cooking “off-grid” by reducing our absolute dependence on centralised supplies of fossil fuel energy.
At the workshop, participants will have a hands-on go at making a batch of charcoal from wood scrap, cooking on a Thai cooker and exploring the use of charcoal for garden soil health.

About the facilitators:
Bruce Teakle, Appropriate Technologist (QLD):  Bruce has decades of experience as a blacksmith, fine hand-tool woodworker and home-spun electric bike builder. Bruce once built a gasifier for his car and drove the family to Mildura and back on just wood offcuts!
Andrew Turbill (Bellingen): Andrew practiced blacksmithing, woodwork, sustainable forestry and built his own yurt, under Bruce’s mentorship. Back in Bellingen with a family, Andrew put these skills into practice on a community, building his own place and permaculture garden. He loves nothing more than cooking up a batch of pancakes on his Thai charcoal cooker!