Oh, I have another thought about this as well. There may even be a permanent way out of the plant graveyard idea: biochar.
Skillcult has a YouTube playlist about it which made my eyebrows raise. The benefits stay in the soil for at least ten thousand years? That’s basically permanent.
He’s definitely convinced me that I should be making biochar and adding it to my soil.
Oh! I just found out there’s a difference between charcoal and biochar. He was talking about charcoal.
Biochar is supposed to be great, but it’s hard to make, and charcoal is dead easy to make. It’s your leftover black stuff after making a fire. And apparently it’s almost as great.
Cool. 
Biochar isn’t especially hard to make.
So, first, depending on how you do the fire, the leftover black stuff may be variable in how pure it is - but that also means it is technically not pure charcoal, not just impure biochar.
There are a whole bunch of different techniques that can be used for making biochar depending on the scale, the source material, heat source, how much you care about purity and/or waste (whether that is waste of fuel, heat, or unburnt gases sent into the atmosphere…), and what sort of infrastructure or equipment you may or may not have access to or desire to use.
You can make it VERY complicated, capturing excess wood gas and storing it to be burnt later as the initial heat source for the next reaction so there is no/limited material wasted in the process and it all get converted into char.
But it doesn’t have to be complicated at all. It can be a top lit camp fire. Or a whole slew of options in-between - even some of the versions with “equipment” start out at the level of using basically a paint can and a soup can or something like that.
The main distinction though between charcoal and biochar is the “bio” part - and that centers mostly around whether it has been “charged” with biology growing inside of it to serve as an inoculant to the soil.
Ahhhhh! That makes sense! Thank you for explaining it!
I’m very interested in the idea of making charcoal (or biochar ) as the remains of an outdoor fire I use to cook on. It seems to me that would be a perfect example of stacking functions.
Also, if you bury it, won’t it charge itself no matter what…it just takes a while?
Good point!
The guy who made those videos says he always buries his charcoal with food scraps and/or urine, and it doesn’t tie up nitrogen because it buries it with nitrogen, so I thought, “Great! That’s what I’ve been doing with un-burnt wood, a.k.a. hugelkultur, and that seems to work well too.”
Yeah, exactly, unfortunately I believe that has been at least one of the issues causing mixed results in scientific studies claiming to test biochar.
Many of them don’t seem to document how they charge/inoculate the char prior to burying it. Which means over a long term, it would still be helpful, but they quite often look at only the first years production. And some of these studies show that burying char which is not inoculated can actually reduce the production in the initial year/years as the soil biology moves into the new living space which has just become available to it. But more of the studies I’ve seen which actually document inoculating the biochar first show it helping right away.
But either way, things will eventually work out so that having the char in the soil helps with both moisture retention (as well as drainage oddly enough) and a thriving soil food web.
Yesterday, I was breathing out carbon dioxide and nitrogen as I was picking leaves from my sweet basil. I hope one day my basil can acquire the ability to absorb the nitrogen that its leaves are floating in.
Virtually all carbon based life forms require nitrogen. The air around us is more than 75% nitrogen. Unfortunately, the ability to transform this abundant life force is reserved for legumes and their exclusive microbe cronies. Other plants require humans to purchase nitrogen fertilizer and give them this resource. The wild, non legume, plants in the forest are being secretly supplied with nitrogen by the little squirrels that pee on their roots and the aliens that respond to crop circles.
Hopefully the rain droplets this week will pound some of that air into the soil next to my sweet basil.
Could always start peeing on the Basil yourself, just like a wild little squirrel.
Not recommended because urine is such strong fertilizer that, when it’s undiluted, it overfertilizes plants to death. Now, urinating into a bucket and mixing at least ten times as much water in, that’s recommended. 
I’ve been treating it like crap ever since I planted that .50 cent seed packet. It keeps producing leaves and seeds over and over. I cut a few down in half with some loppers and they still kept producing. We have enough dried, crushed basil leaves to last a couple months probably. I saved a load of seeds. Unfortunately, not every species I’ve tried responds this way.