Pot ash is good for plants, as is bong water......haha

I've most often mixed it in with compost too, but i've read that it doesn't do the pile any good.
I think that wood ash enriched ground is particularly good for beets and spinich ( this from my own observation of many years ago)

Here is some info that i just now found.

www.tulsamastergardeners.org/bla....htm

Is anything safe these days? I think the only way to avoid toxins these days is to just go ahead and die....but then again I'm a pessimist at times when it comes to man's affect on nature....

Truly though.... Dillution is the solution to the pollution....man made it man must filter it...

I have also read that wood ash is a bad idea for many reasons, I had never heard the radio active thing before but it makes sense. How about using the ash for things like paths where I don't want plants growing. kind of like a weed killer? Would that worK?

As the author of the small study cited by Janet Raloff in her brief note about radioactive wood ash and a technical paper I presented at a scientific conference annual meeting of the Health Physics Society, an international organization devoted to radiation protection in industrial and medical application, I can comment accurately on this issue. The paper I wrote and presented in 1991 was titled: "Cesium 137 Survey in Woodash --Or Woodburners and Organic Farmers, is it time to kiss your ash goodbye?" This subtitle was a question, not an answer. My paper gave the data, and it was up to the reader or woodash user to judge if the trivial radiation dose increase was something they wanted to avoid. I presented an expanded paper on this subject to an EPA and DOE sponsored annual Biofuels conference in 1992.

If woodash from homes, wood burning power plants, or pulp and paper mills burning wood waste were subject to the same disposal regulations required for slightly contaminated wastes from hospitals or nuclear plants, the cost of wood ash disposal would be a few hundred dollars per cubic food, and would cost industrial woodburning facilities billions of dollars per year for equivalent waste disposal.

A few measurements of Cesium-137 [a radioactive fission product from exploding nuclear weapons and the fissioning of uranium or plutonium] with a half-life of 30 years --not thousands of years as written in some posts by other parties], in wood ash from California showed Cs-137 levels 100 times lower than in the Eastern US. This is not because CA is upwind of the Nevada test site, but issues of soil chemistry in California vs. the East. The radioactive deposition in CA from global nuclear fallout was about one-third of that in the East since most of the fallout circling the globe was from open air tests by the Soviet Union and the US west of California that reached into the stratosphere and was deposited to the earth's surface primarily through 1968.

As a Public Health scientist, I believe the Cs-137 levels in woodash, despite being elevated all over the US, and contributing to a trivial radiation increase if used as a fertilizer, are of essentially no concern from a health point of view. A person would get more radiation dose by living on the first floor or a house vs. the second floor than using radioactive woodash on their gardens. A person putting storm windows on their homes would cause higher levels of Radon-222 inside their homes [due to less air infiltration from cleaner ambient air], leading to radiation dose increases hundreds, if not thousands times or more higher than would result from woodash use as a fertilizer.

Space and time does not permit discussion of many statements in the post below about the issue of radiation in the environment and radiation health effects. The statement in the post I am commenting upon: "A-bomb enthusiasts assumed, optimistically, that it had gone away". Quite the contrary. The US and the Soviets entered into an open air test ban treaty in 1963. Thousands and thousands of scientific studies have been done on weapon's test fallout in the environment, by governments around the world, and countless academic institutions. All scientists knew that radioactive fallout was still in the environment and decaying away, primarily with a half-life of 30 years or so for Cs-137 and Strontium-90, two isotopes forming almost all of nuclear test fallout.

The presence of nuclear fallout in the Northern and Southern hemispheres has allowed scientists to understand countless environmental processes and behavior of something seemingly unrelated like dating layers of ice buidup in glaciers today which allow for studying global warming trends, or sedimentation of various non-radioactive pollutant layers in lakes or ocean sediments. I recently worked with some academic researches to help them acquire the instrumentation they needed to measure Cs-137 and Sr-90 in ice layers related to understanding global warming trends from the buildup of ice layers.

Studies of radioactivity in the environment and the health effects of radiation exposure have been studied far, far more than any other non-radioactive pollutant, many of which have health effects thousands of times higher -like mercury. Billions of dollars have been spent on studying radiation health effects, and radioactivity in the environment. No other pollutant has been studied as intensively.

It is regrettable that dogmatic opposition to nuclear electric generation has led to building more coal fired power plants to meet growing electric demand. China is opening a new coal fired power plant each WEEK. The US has not ordered a new power plant in 30 years or started one up for about 15 years. Coal fired power plants contribute more to increasing public radiation exposure due to natural radioactivity in plant effluents and pollutants from coal ash leaching into the environment than does an equivalent sized nuclear power plant.

Plus as a major benefit, nuclear generation worldwide has avoided the production of billions of tons of CO-2 [carbon dioxide] had that power come from fossil generation of the same amount of electricity. Had nuclear plants not been in operation for the past 20 years, the greenhouse effect would be much worse than it is now and more people would be dying in the here and now from even worse heat waves [a thousand or more in some single summer heat waves in Europe and elsewhere], heavier rain in some areas [hundreds of deaths time and again in mudslides], causing insect increases resulting in more disease by the many tens of thousands in many parts of Africa, more intense hurricanes and typhoons, and negative effects on agriculture. I am amazed how so many people are blind to the benefits of nuclear electric generation in the here and now, but only willing to focus on theoretical health effects in the distant future [sometimes integrated over 10,000 years and more] from trivial radiation exposures for which not proof exists of health effects at such low levels.

I've been surfing around looking for hard data on the radioactivity thing and can't find much. I was told many years ago not to use wood ashes because of heavy metals. I thought at the time that it was probably ok to use in moderation, but to avoid using a lot. This is still my opinion after reading all i can find about it.

Here is a short and i think reasonable piece on the subject.

gardening.about.com/od/soil/...d_Ash.htm