8 Smart Ways to Use Wood Ash Around Your Home and Homestead

If you heat your home with wood, then you have buckets and buckets of wood ash piling up every winter.

Is there a good use for all that wood ash?

Before early American settlers could plant crops like corn and wheat, they had to clear trees. A lot of trees. A large fraction of those trees did not become lumber--they were burned.

From our modern eco-conscious mindset, that seems like a tragedy. But the ash did not go to waste--it was a valuable commodity. Europeans had cut down the majority of their forests and were looking to the new world to supply the demand.

Ash buyers, or potash agents, would make the rounds to settlements and buy up the ash that settlers produced. These men hauled loads of ash to the nearest potash factory (ashery) where it was processed into lye and potash, and sometimes further refined into pearlash.

These chemicals, derived from all natural wood ash, brought the early industrial revolution to the colonies. They were used to make things like soap, glass, tanned leather, gun powder, paper, bleached cotton, and helped process woolen goods. It was used as a leavening agent. Potassium (the name is derived from potash) is one of the three mega nutrients required to sustain life, and potash was and still is a valuable fertilizer.

Even after land had been cleared and was growing food crops, farmers would save their fireplace ashes either for their own use, or sometimes to sell to provide money to pay their taxes. Wood ash was never seen as a burden, it was a precious resource.

In our modern life, is there still a good use for wood ash? Absolutely! Maybe you can't sell it, but there are lots of good uses for it, especially if you like to use natural materials around your home and homestead.

1. Garden Fertilizer:

Wood ash provides one of the three major nutrients that a garden needs. Fertilizers come with NPK ratios, which tells you how much relative nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium they contain. Potassium is the K in NPK. Wood ash is very rich in potassium. It also contains many other micro nutrients, notably calcium.

Because wood ash is alkaline, it sweetens acidic soil. The only crop that I don't put ash on is potatoes, because potatoes are unusual: they like soil that is acidic or alkaline, not neutral. Everything else benefits from the ability of wood ash to boost out naturally acidic soil pH. How much ash to use depends on how much you have available. If you have limited quantities, a light sprinkling over the surface will be great. If you have a lot, don't be afraid to be a little heavy handed with it.

You will see some claims that wood ash deters snails and slugs from your garden. Unfortunately, I have not found this to be true. For pest control, I rely on organic certified Sluggo.

Your compost pile will also benefit from any extra ash you can give it.

If your wood ash contains bits of charcoal, the charcoal acts as a powerhouse for storing nutrients. Charcoal is a great way to build organic matter in soil and boost overall soil health.

2. Traction for Slippery Walkways:

If you get icy steps and walkways, sprinkle wood ash on them. It's all natural and safe for pets. The natural salts in ash helps to melt ice a little, though not to the degree that chemical de-icers do.

Ash is effective at giving traction to a car that is stuck in slippery snow or ice, and can be used like you would use sand.

3. Clean Up Spills:

Not only does the powdery nature of wood ash easily absorb liquids, but the natural lye in ash reacts with oil (just like soap makers adding lye to oil to make soap), which helps remove the stain if you spill oil on cement.

4. Livestock:

Chickens crave a dust bath, and wood ash is a great material for them to bathe in because ash repels pests like mites.

They say that ash makes a great natural wormer for livestock. I will be honest and tell you that I only tried giving it to my animals once and it probably wasn't enough to make a huge difference. So while I can't endorse it from personal experience, I would encourage you to experiment with using wood ash as a wormer.

Ash is a great natural alternative to cat litter. As a bonus, it absorbs odors.

Use ash to dust livestock that have mites.

5. Lye for Soap Making:

No one recorded the first time that "soap was discovered", but I think that the process started slowly, with someone using wood ash to scrub a greasy pot. The combination of caustic wood ash, grease, and hot water did a great job of not only removing the residue from the pot, but could even be used to clean greasy hands after. From there, it was just a matter of refining the process.

As a soap maker, I have experimented making soap with wood ash lye a couple of times. It's tricky because it's hard to get ash lye to a precise strength, and that can result in soap that is too caustic. Because I sell my soap, I want it to have a predictable, gentle touch, so I use store bought lye.

Soap made with ash lye is not like the bar soap that you are used to. It was called "soft soap" and had a pastey texture and taupe color. Its smell isn't very pleasant.

You make the lye by soaking water in a bucket of ash for a couple weeks. Prepare the bucket by drilling a hole on the bottom of one side and plug it with a nail. Put a layer of hay, then rocks, over the bottom. Fill with wood ash. Collect rain water to leach it. Pour in as much rain water as it will hold, then put a lid on it and let it sit for a couple of weeks.

The dark brown liquid that results is lye. It has to be strong enough to float an egg, so leave it long enough, or put it through another bucket of ash, to make it strong enough.

When the lye is strong enough, harvest it by unplugging the nail and let it drain out. Be cautious and wear gloves, it is very caustic.

I am not proficient enough at making soft soap to give you instructions for how to do it, but do experiment if you want to try your hand! I can, however, sell you lard to make authentic lard soft soap with your ash lye!

6. Abrasive Cleaner:

Anything that is oil based melts under scrubbing with wood ash. The creosote that builds up on wood stove windows is no match for ash. The grease that bakes on glass stove tops or in the oven can be scrubbed away with wood ash.

Be sure to use the fine, powdery ash and not chunks of charcoal that might scratch the surface. Dampen a paper towel, dip it in ash, and scrub away.

7. Nixtamalizing Corn:

Native Central Americans processed corn in a way that increased its nutritional value and gave it a suitable texture for making dough for tortillas. The process is called nixtamalization and involves boiling whole corn with ash, then boiling several times in fresh water to remove the caustic agent. The ratio is one part ash to four parts dry corn. Wrap the ash in a cloth to contain the messiness of it. (Don't keep adding as much water with each rinse as it will absorb, as it seemingly absorbs endless amounts of water.) The result is hominy. If you make dough out of hominy, that is masa.

Modern tortillarias use lye or chemical lime to nixtamalize corn. While the corn is effectively nixtamalized with the modern chemical treatments, it lacks the micro-nutrients provided by wood ash nixtamalization. Our nutrient depleted soils grow nutrient depleted crops. Wood ash from deep rooted trees is a great way to add nutrients to your diet that you need.

8. Charcoal for Detox:

Charcoal is not wood ash, but wood ash usually contains little black bits of charcoal. Charcoal is chunks of wood that went through the first phase of burning and became red hot embers, but then cooled before they burned completely down to ash.

Charcoal is amazing at detoxing your body. If you could see it under a microscope, you would see that is has millions of tiny pores all through it. These pores have a negative charge and many toxins, gases, drugs, and heavy metals are atracted to them, where they get bound and exit your body in the stool.

My first response if someone has a tummy ache is to give them charcoal.

You want to give charcoal that has a lot of surface area--in other words, charcoal that has been crushed into as small of pieces as possible. The charcoal that you can buy in capsules has been ground into powder. Charcoal is surprisingly hard to grind, and you might prefer to buy it already powdered and in capsules. Don't be afraid to use your own charcoal if you want to, though. Just smash it with a hammer or chew it up. Kind of like taking clay (that's a topic for a future blog...), it doesn't taste great, but the purpose it to remove poison, not to taste good, and it is very effective at removing poisons.

Special Considerations:

If you are going to use wood ash or charcoal in or on your body, your pets, or your garden, be mindful about its source. Don't use wood that was treated with chemicals. Pellets for pellet stoves are chemically treated.

Don't breathe ash dust.

Make sure that they are completely cool before handling.