What are ashes used for
8 Uses for Wood Ash In Your Home, Garden, and Plants
Back when we used fireplaces to heat our homes, cleaning out wood ashes from the hearth was a daily chore. Today, after a cozy winter fire, or use of a wood stove or backyard fire pit, we can collect the wood ash on a more leisurely basis, and put it to excellent use.
Note: When using wood ash, always be sure it’s completely cool and free of live embers, and wear protective gloves. Keep ash in a tightly lidded metal container.
What is Wood Ash Good For?
We may not burn as much firewood as we used to, but ash is still a great raw resource with a variety of benefits and uses around the home. Here are 8 ways you can use fireplace ashes around your home and garden.
1. Amending Soil and Boosting Your Lawn
Wood ash can be used to boost the pH of your lawn’s soil quickly—faster than limestone, since the ash is more water soluble. Start by getting your lawn or garden soil tested to determine its pH. Most lawn and garden soil does well at a pH level between 6.0 and 7.0. Higher than 7, and it’s considered alkaline. Lower than 6, and it’s considered acidic. If your soil is already between 6 and 7, there’s no need to change the pH.
Certain plants, including some flowers and vegetables, thrive at different soil pH levels. For example, tomato plants need lots of calcium and potassium, and generally require soil amendments that provide high doses of these nutrients—something that an amendment of wood ash can deliver quickly, since it’s naturally rich in both of these nutrients and its water soluble. Since plant roots are inefficient at absorbing calcium and potassium from the soil itself, if your garden contains too acidic soil (which is low in those nutrients), you should amend it to promote healthy vegetable production in those plants.
Wood ash is also made up of other nutrients in smaller amounts, including aluminum, magnesium, phosphorus, and sodium.
Some plants, such as alfalfa, hay, and corn, remove nutrients from the soil, and amendments or crop rotations are used to reintroduce them. Wood ash can provide those nutrients if needed.
Check your plant and soil needs before arbitrarily adding wood ash around your property. Certain acid-loving plants like blueberries, azaleas, and rhododendrons won’t like having their soil made more alkaline. And adding loads of wood ash in any one spot is never a good thing.
Note: Do not add ashes directly to plants’ leaves or stems (rinse off, if necessary, after application) and choose a day when winds are calm to avoid misapplication. As always, use proper eye, face, and skin protection during application.
2. Add Ash to Your Home Compost
A sprinkle of wood ashes can be added to your outdoor compost pile or indoor compost bin as one component of your household waste. A small amount with each layer of compost will add nutrients to the end soil or “compost tea.
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You can also make your own wood ash tea by soaking ashes in water for 4-5 days, and then applying that product to plant soil as needed. Three pounds of wood ash steeped and strained afterwards (like you’re making a big batch of wood ash tea) in a 30-gallon bucket of water can provide a benefit to certain plants during the growing season. (Apply judiciously—a little goes a long way. And make sure you’ve researched your plants’ specific alkalinity requirements in advance.)
3. Wood Ashes for Cleaning
Looking for a cost-free cleaner for glass and metal? Wood ashes, mixed with a bit of water to form a paste, can be used as a mild abrasive to buff up tarnished metals, clean dirty glass, and even remove adhesives and sticky residue. Apply the paste with a cotton cloth while wearing gloves to protect your skin. Try in a small spot at first to test the results.
4. Make Soap at Home
The first soaps were made on homesteads by combining water and wood ash to make lye, a necessary component of soap.
Ashes from burned hardwoods (such as ash, hickory, or beech) are used for this purpose since they contain enough potassium to produce lye.
Careful production can yield homemade soap from what you’d otherwise throw away, though with a bit more effort than it takes to buy a bottle or bar. (If going the homemade route, follow instructions from a reputable source and make sure to wear protective gear to avoid burns.)
5. Keep Harmful Bugs Away
Wood ashes can be used to deter pests like slugs and snails, and even to repel ants. Sprinkle a small amount or ring around susceptible plants and reapply after the rain washes the ash away.
6. Add Traction to Slippery Walkways
Like gravel on snow-covered streets, wood ash can be applied to provide traction underfoot. You can even keep some in a closed metal container in your car or truck to use in an emergency to get out of a slippery spot. (Just be careful not to track the ash back into the house on your soles.)
7.
Soak Up Driveway Spills Changing the oil on your car? Or just spilled something that might stain? Use wood ash to absorb the spill. The driveway’s dark asphalt will mask the ash’s color, and the ash’s absorbing properties should allow you to sweep up the spill afterwards.
8. Fire Control
If you’ve ever “smothered a fire” at a campsite by shifting ashes over hot coals, you know that ash can form a great air-tight barrier that will help extinguish the flames.
Wood ashes can help put out a fire when a fire extinguisher, soil, or sand is unavailable. Always extinguish a fire completely and make sure no embers are left smoldering as they could reignite. A final check for any hot spots (hover your bare hand in several spots over the wet embers) ensures you won’t have a fire reignite later.
Uses for Ash - 15 Handy Things You Can Do
Add to Compost
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Adding wood ash to your compost pile is a wonderful way to both recycle that waste and boost the potassium level of your compost.
There’s a reason gardeners call compost “black gold”—it's a gold mine of nutrition for your plants in the spring.
Related: 7 Times to Throw Garbage in Your Garden
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Use as Ice Melt
2/15
It’s not a bad idea to keep a container of recycled fireplace ashes in your trunk in the winter. They can give your car traction on an icy patch of road, and the potassium salts in ashes can help melt snow in moderately cold conditions.
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Amend Your Soil
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If you have acidic soil, you can amend it with wood ash to raise its pH. Because wood ash is about 70 percent calcium carbonate, it will do the same thing lime does, but even more quickly because its particle size is so much smaller.
Related: The Best Things You Can Do for Your Garden Soil
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Absorb Odors
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Wood ash is alkaline, just like baking soda, which means it will absorb moisture and odors from the air.
Put a small bowl of it in your fridge or in a musty room, and it will absorb the odors, making things fresh again.
Related: Clear the Air: 10 Natural Ways to Cure Household Odors
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Clean Up Stains on the Driveway
5/15
You can remove oil stains from your asphalt or concrete driveway with ashes from your fireplace. Sprinkle the ashes on top of a stain, let them sit for several hours to absorb the oil, then sweep it all away with a broom.
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Control Slugs and Snails
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Gardeners have long used ashes to deter slugs and snails from their veggie beds. Because wood ash is a natural desiccant, and the bodies of slugs and snails have such a high water content, the critters are loath to cross it. So, put a ring of wood ash around plants to keep these pests at bay.
Related: 8 Ways to Combat Garden Pests
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Make Soap
7/15
When you mix wood ash with water, you get lye, which is a common ingredient in traditional soap-making. Throw in a form of fat and add a lot of boiling and stirring, and you’ve got homemade soap.
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Polish Metal
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Wood ash is a mild abrasive, so if you mix it with a little water to make a paste, you can polish up silver and other metals.
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Slow Algae Growth
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While wood ash won’t actually kill algae, ashes can help to control it. Because wood ash is so high in potassium, sprinkling it into a pond will encourage the other plants to grow and compete with the algae, keeping it in check.
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Remove Skunk Stink
10/15
If your pet has ever had a run-in with a skunk, you know how hard it is to get rid of the stench! Because fireplace ashes absorb odors, you can use them to get your pet smelling better, faster.
Just rub ashes into your pet's fur to absorb the smell.
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Clean Up Soot
11/15
In the same way that a wood-ash paste can remove tarnish, it can be used to removed soot from your fireplace doors. Simply mix ashes and a little water into a paste, then use it as a mild abrasive to get that glass shiny and clean again.
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Make Natural Bleach
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When wood ash is mixed with water, the resulting substance is called lye water. Lye water is often used in soap, but it can also be used by itself as a bleaching agent. A cupful added to a load of wash should do the trick.
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Control Humidity
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Wood ash is a desiccant that you can put to use in humid spaces, like a damp basement or poorly ventilated bathroom. Just a small tray of wood ash in the corner can help draw the humidity out of a room.
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Deter Ants
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Have ants taken over in your lawn? Sprinkle a layer of wood ash over those ant hills to force them to relocate.
Related: 12 Tried-and-True Tricks to Stamp Out Ants
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Put Out Fires
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Just like sand, fine wood ash can smother a small fire. Keep a bucket of ash close to the fire pit or fireplace in case you need to extinguish any wayward embers.
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Ashes as fertilizer - properties, rules and benefits of using
Mon, 21/11/2016 - 10:31 | Comments: 0 | Author: OLCHUKS
Fertilizers that can be prepared from natural raw materials are of great benefit.
Among them is ash, or ashes, obtained from the burning of wood material. Let's see what benefits the use of ashes brings as a top dressing for plants in the garden.
Even in ancient times, people noticed that after burning old, uprooted trees in these places, the yield is higher, the plants grow and develop better. They still get ashes now, burning prunings, branches of trees, bushes. You can add tops of garden plants, dried corn stalks, sunflowers.
Contents:
- Useful properties of ashes, benefits of organic nutrition
- Fertilization methods
- Recommendations for the use of ash as fertilizer
- When not to use ash top dressing
Useful properties of ashes, benefits of organic feeding
Usually the composition of the ashes cannot be the same, since different types of wood are sent to the fire. But the general formula of the fertilizer was nevertheless deduced:
- Calcium carbonate salts are characterized by the property of increasing the movement of nutrients through plant cells, normalizing the course of biochemical processes in them.
- Calcium sulfate salts are commonly known as superphosphate, which is quite popular as a mineral fertilizer.
- The absorption of macronutrients is facilitated by silicic acid salts.
- Potassium orthophosphate can regulate the water balance in plants, it helps with large amounts of ammonia in fruits and leaves.
- A substance such as calcium chloride leads to the activation of photosynthesis. Thanks to its action, nutrients are transported to the leaves and buds.
- The building material is magnesium, its salts. There are enough of them in the ashes.
All these substances have a positive effect on the growth of garden plants, allows you to retain moisture in the leaves, stems, which is especially necessary during dry summers.
Enriching the soil with potassium, calcium, the fertilizer deoxidizes it, creating favorable conditions for worms that enrich the soil with nitrogen.
In addition to supplying vegetables and flowers with useful substances, the ashes help against diseases of green spaces: cracking of carrots, blackening of tomatoes, rot of potatoes, black leg of rose bushes.
You can use wood ash for indoor flowers. The use of ashes as plant food has been known for a long time and benefits both plants and the earth.
Ways of applying fertilizer
As an organic top dressing, ashes are used in three ways:
- Sprinkling dry ash around fruit trees, in cucumber holes, between onion rows, you can provide the plants with the missing nutrients. This method of top dressing is carried out necessarily with mixing the ash with the soil. Usually, from one hundred to three hundred grams of ash is applied per square meter of the garden, which corresponds to half a liter. The procedure is carried out in the spring, when peat and sandy soil is enriched, and in the fall they are brought into loam. After the dry ashes have been scattered around the plants, the area is watered abundantly. Especially happy are the dry ashes of the beds with onions, as the ashes will save the vegetable from pests.
- A liquid organic fertilizer solution is prepared from one glass of ashes mixed with ten liters of water.
Cucumber plantings are watered with this liquid, but you can’t overdo it here, otherwise the fruits will give off bitterness. But tomatoes, on the contrary, respond to feeding with sweetness, juiciness. Ash solution is useful for vegetable seedlings, especially cabbage. He will save young shoots from rot, strengthen them. - Many gardeners add the ashes to the compost in order to use it later in growing early crops of cucumbers and cabbages.
Recommendations for the use of ash as a fertilizer
The basic rules for applying fertilizer in the form of ash are as follows: .
Then the heads of cabbage will be whole, juicy, and the vegetable will be saved from the keel. 
During the planting of the vegetable, along with the planting material, a teaspoon of wood ash is poured into the hole. A small amount of fertilizer is needed due to the fact that the acidity of the earth can decrease, and potatoes do not like this. Fertilizer is also indispensable for changing the composition of the soil. Only three hundred grams of fertilizer per square meter will improve the fertility of loamy and clay soils. It is able to balance the acidity and alkaline component of the earth in the area. Before applying fertilizer in the form of ashes, you need to know whether this can be done or not.
When not to use ash top dressing
But, like any product, ash has contraindications for use. Since this fertilizer contains a lot of potassium, calcium, with an excess of these elements in the soil, the introduction of ash will only bring harm. Plants will help to find out about this: their leaves fall off or become discolored, shoots die off on tomatoes, and grapes and apple trees are covered with excess leaf rosettes, fruit fruits begin to turn brown.
Nitrogenous and phosphate fertilizers, which are purchased in a store, must not be applied to the soil together with ash. This will lead to increased release of ammonia, which is especially harmful to plants.
Organic top dressings in the form of fresh manure, urea, saltpeter also do not tolerate mixing with ashes.
The choice of wood ash as a fertilizer will help to give strength to the growth of vegetables, fruits, flowers, and human health will be preserved due to the natural product as a top dressing of the site and plants.
Available fertilizer - ashes - used by many gardeners on the plots. How to do it correctly, without harming the plants, is described in the material. From here you can learn about the beneficial properties of organic top dressing, how to use it correctly. It is also highlighted in which cases the application of fertilizer is harmful to the soil, trees, flowers.
More information can be found in the video:
Category: Increasing fertility | Plant nutrition
tips - Ukraine - tsn.ua
Many gardeners use the ashes as fertilizer. However, it must be remembered that this tool is not suitable for feeding all plants. TSN.ua talks about important points that you need to pay attention to if you want to bring ashes under trees, bushes or vegetables.
There are several rules for the use of ashes to feed plants and trees.
- Ash as a fertilizer can only be used on acidic and slightly acidic soils . But on alkaline, it will only aggravate the situation. Be sure to find out what type of soil is on the site before use. To do this, purchase a litmus stick at any gardening store.
- Not all plants tolerate ash well, but only those that like acidic soils. Ash as a fertilizer is suitable for cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, peppers. But blueberries, mountain ash, viburnum, hydrangea, honeysuckle are best fed with potassium sulfate.
- Remember best time to apply ash . Experts recommend to do this in the spring to additionally feed the soil. For this, such a mineral fertilizer is being prepared: ash 1 bucket per 3-4 square meters of land. After that, the soil becomes very loose.
- Do not spread ashes on seeds that have begun to germinate . Ash is sprinkled under plants and bushes so that it comes into contact with the roots. Then they grow stronger and more magnificent.
- Well proven ash on aphids . To combat the pest, a decoction is prepared: sift 300 g of ash, pour water and boil for 20 minutes. Let stand, drain, add 10 liters of water and spray the affected plants.
- Use houseplant ash . For top dressing, you need to prepare such a solution: 50-75 g of ash per 5 liters of water, mix well. Steep for a week, stirring occasionally. This solution is suitable for feeding all indoor plants in the house.
- Such a mineral fertilizer as ash has proved to be excellent for rare feeding of plants in the garden and in the garden. To do this, take 1 glass of ash per bucket of water (10 liters). Pour only under the root of vegetables or bushes.
- Ash as fertilizer is excellent for strawberries and strawberries . You need to feed immediately after flowering. Apply 10-15 g of ash per bush. It will protect strawberries and strawberries from pests and gray rot.
- When planting tree and bush seedlings, a small amount of ash should be thrown into the soil in order for the plant to quickly adapt to new conditions.
Wood ash contains quite a lot of potassium (10-12%), so it is very useful for cucumbers, tomatoes, strawberries, strawberries, potatoes, onions, peppers, cabbage, carrots, grapes, etc.
