COMPOSTING TOILET SYSTEMS
Tuesday, 24 November
2nd Quarter Moon
Greetings, Living Earth Gardeners! Last week we began looking more in-depth at the Secondary Elements/Support Systems of our Project, by focusing on water access. Let's refresh our minds by listing again all 4 secondary design elements:
- Well for access to clean drinking water.
- Compost Toilets, to capture nutrients and avoid waste.
- Solar Shower, to rinse off sweat and dust.
- Compost Piles, for maintaining soil fertility.
This week we will focus on 'humanure". Human manure is an uncomfortable subject for many people, especially those of us living in the overdeveloped parts of the world. In The Humanure Handbook : a guide to composting humane manure, by Joseph Jenkins, describes this condition as fecalphobia - an irrational fear of handling our own bodily wastes. Let's be honest about the current situation : an elaborate and expensive system of plumbing has been designed and built so that we can avoid the responsibility of dealing with our own crap. This system is not only elaborate and expensive, but it is also not that effective, nor is it efficient. Plumbing just moves the stuff out of our view and out of our thinking. The real insanity, as Jenkins points out astutely, is to be defecating directly into our precious drinking water. Excuse me for going off a bit on this point. It is important that we shift the paradigm strongly on this issue, so that we can overcome our own inhibitions regarding humanure-composting. I can attest from experience, that it does take some time to overcome fecalphobia.
Now, the good news is that there have been many different composting toilet systems developed. The Composting Toilet System Book, by David del Porto and Carol Steinfeld gives an exhaustive overview of all the choices available. The systems presented range widely in their levels of complexity, cost, and user involvement. This range is broad enough that I would think anyone could begin humanure composting at their current level of comfort.
The composting system we have chosen is known as the sawdust bucket system, and it is fully described in The Humanure Handbook. Let me hold off getting into the details of this particular system until next week. While it is a simple system, it does require a certain level of skill and knowledge to do properly, so I will need more time and space to present it adequately.
Instead, let me describe how I started humanure composting back when we lived in a conventional house with flush toilets connected to a municipal sewage system. I focused on capturing and recycling my own urine while continuing to use the flush toilets for fecal matter. Most experts agree that urine from a healthy person is sterile. You may have even heard of people using their urine medicinally, even drinking it. I myself, once used my own urine to treat poison oak effectively, keeping the oils from spreading until I could get some medicinal cream.
To recycle urine back at that house in town, I would fill a 5 gallon bucket full of loose straw and keep it in the storage area where my garden tools were. Whenever I was working in our garden (which was most of the time), and needed to urinate, I would use this straw-filled bucket. At the end of the week, when it came time to build onto our current compost pile, I would create a 'bowl' in the straw at the top of the pile, empty the urine-soaked straw into it, then add any plant debris and all food scraps generated that week, and finish with a new layer of loose straw on top of that (which would receive the following week's urine-soaked straw). This method, which I used for many years, never produced a stinky compost pile.
There are many possible variations to this method, as well as the usual details to work out when beginning a new practice.
Please contact us with any question you may have! Or leave comments about this information!
With best wishes for this week,
Gardener/Visionary Machei
Taos, New Mexico
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