Wood ash is excellent soil food, full of important micronutrients
Channel: Zwartbles Ireland Suzanna Crampton
Date: 2022-12-09

Wood ash from trees grown from our farm’s soil returns many important micro nutrients to soil, like phosphates, iron, manganese, boron, copper and zinc.
Wood ash is also excellent natural way to get rid of thistles.
Thistles are a component in sheep catching an unpleasant thing called orf. Orf shows itself as a rash of blistering pustules & when bad prevent lambs from suckling or ewes from grazing as they’re in so much pain.
Wood ash supplies soil with nutrients that thistle doesn’t need so it doesn’t grow. Like potassium, calcium, smaller amounts of phosphorous, magnesium, manganese, zinc, boron & copper
It’s similar to lime in balancing soil ph but it doesn’t burn up organic matter like lime does. 


Zwartbles Ireland is a small company run from a farm in County Kilkenny in Ireland. We are a regenerative farm which means restoring soils health and regenerating its natural carbon and nutrient cycle with biodiversity of pasture sward with grasses, legumes, forbs and herbs. This also means we farm with nature. Healthy soils are important for healthy environment. So we encourage all life from the microbial to dung beetles, ants, pollinators to flora biodiversity, birds, hare, hedgehogs, rabbits, fox, badger as well as our livestock. This mean we farm in a style of mob grazing and giving fields long rest times between grazings. We have seen a huge increase and return of wildlife including woodcock and snipe in winter months foraging for dung beetle larvae, red squirrel, wood peckers and pine martens. We also have the rare natter bat and previously thought extinct Tawny Mining bees.
We sell, Zwartbles sheep, Zwartbles blankets and yarn made from the sheep, and calendars featuring Inca the World's Smallest Sheepdog and her coworkers. We also sell alpaca yarn spun for our own alpaca. Our yarns are 100 percent natural, grown by our sheep which grazing our small green Irish fields. This wool is naturally sequestered carbon which you can then knit into warm environmental friendly clothing.