Update Jan. 9, 2014

  My two week hiatus was an eventful time for my experiment, so I feel a need to play catch up here. On December 21st I found something that startled me, weeds were starting to sprout in my soils before I had inoculated them. Now I know what your thinking, that's no big deal because these things would happen out in the field where you would be implementing this. While that is true to some extent, I was worried for two reasons: one being that the roots of these weeds would be interfere with the growth of the plants I was measuring, and two, the plants would have a positive effect on bacterial numbers due to root exudates that they release. The second reason was bad because I felt that this would give these particular pots and unfair advantage when it came time to actually grow.
  This caused be to do something drastic; strain the soil and remove all seeds that I planted and any seeds that were already there. After I did this, I actually inoculated the designated soils with biochar and compost, and left my leaf mulch where it needed to be, along with getting the coffee filters filled with compost and biochar into their particular pots. With that done, I replanted. So that was about a week and a half to two weeks ago.
  Within the recent days I have had an unidentified plant sprouting. It is sprouting in several pots. It appears to be a foreign species because it is sprouting in pots with no overlapping species. The fact that I missed it when I strained the soil is troubling, but I will have to live with it. I may actually be able to use it by measuring its growth as well. From what I have seen so far, it is doing very well in the soils inoculated with biochar and compost, in fact, it has only sprouted in two other pots, and those plants are not as large as the others, and are not growing as quickly.
 So, my experiment is full throttle now. I am working on my papers while I watch the growth and will hopefully figure out what that plant is. While I have experienced several problems from the one mentioned above to spilt compost tea, and a mess up with making biochar, I am happy with my experiment still. It will be interesting to see what works and what doesn't at the end of this experiment.