When I started heating with a wood stove a few years ago, I didn’t know what to do with the leftover ash and charcoal. My primary goal was to find a safe place to dump it without causing a brush fire. With some experience, I developed some higher goals for my ash disposal. This blog covers some beneficial uses for wood ash around the house.
When I started heating with a wood stove a few years ago, I didn’t know what to do with the leftover ash and charcoal.
My primary goal was to find a safe place to dump it without causing a brush fire. With some experience, I developed some higher goals for my ash disposal. This blog covers some beneficial uses for wood ash around the house.
The unpaved driveway became the default dumping ground because it was close by and low risk for a runaway fire. The driveway is surfaced with a rock aggregate (a mixture of stones and sediments of various sizes), and it is usually moist just below the surface.
If I have a lot of hot coals in the bucket, I will use a stick to spread everything out and work the coals into the moist stones and sediments. The driveway is also somewhat self-cleaning. During rain events, surface runoff washes away the ash and some of the charcoal via 3 water bars that I have installed to slow and spread runoff.
The charcoal helps to increase traction for foot and vehicle traffic during icy conditions. I suspect the dark color of the charcoal also absorbs solar radiation and helps to melt the ice faster. The most entertaining way to melt the ice is to dump a bucket of hot coals on it and watch/listen to the sizzle. Last year, we mixed dry ash and water to make a paste, which we used to clean the glass pane on the fireplace insert.
Anne Holub’s article for This Old House claims that wood ash can be used to keep garden pests, like snails and slugs, from destroying your plants. Slugs are public enemy number 1 in our garden, so I will be saving some wood ash to sprinkle on and around the garden next year.
I hope that this blog and Anne’s article help to give you some ideas for your wood ash. Let me know if you have other uses for it. Thanks for reading.
