Is ash good for soil?

I read somewhere in passing that you can put ash from your wood burner on your soil as it is good for it. Is this true? If so, where do you put it? Should I wait for a certain time of year?

 

Make sure you dont put it anywhere near hydrangeas or any other acid soil loving plants.

 

Dont put it out until it stops raining ( about july then ) as the minerals wil be leached out of it and rendered worthless.

 

The main ingredient of wood ash is potassium. That also happens to the mineral nutrient needed for flowers, fruit and seed production. Trouble is, it also washes away fairly easily, so I'd say it's best to scatter it on flower beds starting just before the first flowers are due.

@Dips, wood ash is alkaline as you say, but you should have seen the hydrangea growing in my grandparents 'ash mountain' when I was a kid. It was enormous, and properly thriving. This was in a concreted back yard, with no soil. When my grandad cleaned out the open fire, he would place the ash on this ever growing pile in the yard, the ash mountain we called it, this is what the hydrangea was growing in. The ash wasn't pure wood ash though. It was also coal ash, which is acidic (coal contains sulphur, which reacts with water to make sulphuric acid), mixed with wood ash.

 

I put mine around my raspberries every year. Dunno if it helps them out or not, but they have never complained.

 

Ah the coal ash must have certainly made a big difference.

My parents hydrangea went all waxy in texture and aneamic looking the leaves went a very very pale creamy colour. It was saved by digging it up and putting it in a pot so it could recover tho.

 

Wood ash is great stuff! I have had a wood stove for years and put it everywhere that seems to need a bit more fertility. If the lawn is looking a bit yellow I sprinkle it there and it seems to benefit a lot. I sometimes put it around newly planted shrubs and flowers. As others have said, if it's very wet delay it but otherwise I spread whenever I clean out the stove, I don't save it up or put it on the compost heap.

 

Thanks everyone. I must admit I am still a bit scared to try it being a new gardener and all...My garden has been damp for what seems like forever so I'll wait until we have a dry patch...(won't hold my breath).

 

I make my own comfrey liquid feed and I swap some of this for ashes from a wood burning stove with another plot holder, with this I make another liquid feed.

Half fill a bucket with the wood ash, top up with water and leave for a few weeks. Drain off the liquid, allow to settle and bottle. Great for fruiting/flowering plants. I top the bucket up a few times, eventually the sludge goes on the compost heap.

I too have bonfires and when finished and cold I sieve out the solids, remaining ash goes for ash feed liquid. The solids are spread on my growing beds to follow bio-char principles. Bio char is worth reading up on, it's nothing new but the science behind it is just emerging.

In very short bio char holds and stores water, nutrients and greenhouse gasses and then consider that one gram has a surface area of approx. 500 square meters!

A couple of years ago I collected a tree that someone cut down and I have been storing it ever since, the intention is to make a full charcoal burn with it, then spread the remains on all my beds.

Steve...