On the tour of her bathroom, she also mentions that her bathroom sink directly waters plants in her garden with its greywater (since it’s a sink, in this case, greywater is likely soapy water).

I understood that the composting process breaks down any pathogens that might be in the feces, but wondered whether substances like any drugs the person may have been taking would remain.

I also would have loved to see where the urine was diverted and what she did with it.

The present-day pioneer has a tendency to view the past as a romantic age of natural purity, an idealized time to be hearkened back to. They wish to ‘get off the grid’ by using solar energy and farming organically. After all, people lived without modern luxuries for thousands of years. We have the advantage of their lessons plus the best alternative technology has to offer. Why can’t we do it now?

But even Pa Ingalls had to make trips to town. And while his list was primarily staples like sugar and salt, those needs haven’t changed. In fact they’ve grown. Solar panels and water catchment systems might last forever and gardens can provide for many needs, but sooner or later the batteries are going to wear out. Or the salt reserve. One can invest as much money as imaginable  – which is in itself a battery of sorts – to get off the grid, but eventually entropy is going to catch up with you.

To live at a standard American level of comfort requires a connection to the system. We can reduce our dependence but self-reliance is impossible without a drastically revamped lifestyle.

And that’s not going to happen voluntarily. Some days ago I suggested to my wife that we shut off the electricity for a week to see what it would be like to live in the 19^th century. I’d been thinking of lighting some candles and doing without Netflix, but Ann’s look said ‘who’s this maniac I married?’ Then she began listing the things we’d miss.

First came the oven. I suggested cooking over the wood-burning stove and got another look. Haven’t people been cooking over fires for hundreds of years? Why is it so revolutionary to do it in the living room? Next was the water heater. We could boil water for dishes. Bathing would be at a minimum and laundry could wait. Then, how would I write without a computer? Oh yes – with a pen and a notebook. Which left the refrigerator.

As soon as Ann mentioned it I knew my experiment was doomed. The thing was, five years ago we landed on the Big Island in a rustic living situation. Solar power and running water were available but there wasn’t enough electricity for a fridge. We had to go to the grocery store every two days for ice and our food still went bad. That, more than the mosquitoes and the rats and the wild pigs and the humanure, chased her back to the mainland.

The electric refrigerator has been around for about 100 years. It’s relatively new technology, but from a practical point of view technology becomes ‘old’ as soon as no one can remember living without it. That’s certainly the case in America. The fridge makes it so easy to keep store-bought food fresh that we’ve forgotten how to can and dry and otherwise preserve our own harvest to last through the winter.

The modern lifestyle assumes that salt and batteries (and electricity and running water and heat and all the conveniences of grocery stores) will always be available. The modern rustic wants to be prepared in case they aren’t.

I’ve been reading The Humanure Handbook (third edition) which you can find here for free download: http://humanurehandbook.com/

Now that I’ve decided to build my own composting toilet for The Comet camper and opted not to purchase a very expensive one, I really look forward to reading this book. I’m hoping to make the most out of a composting toilet/other compost situation on the road by having a “bumper” garden…I’m working on a design for a little greenhouse that mounts onto the back of The COMET.

I’ve also been reading about worm farms and worm bin composting…there are some great DIY guides out there for making your own cheap worm bin. This may not be ideal for the mobile lifestyle, but I plan on living in The COMET in some places for extended amounts of time at some point, and it’s pretty interesting anyway. Maybe I can get my parents to get a worm bin!

Another composting situation that REALLY appeals to me (and is not perfect for mobile living either, but hey!) is a bunny rabbit compost set-up. Apparently rabbit poop is really good for compost, and can even be used raw (without going through a composting process at all!). I was reading about a set-up where there is a compost bin directly underneath the rabbit’s coop/dwelling, and the poop just goes right into the compost! I’m not exactly sure how well this works in practice, but it seems like a great idea. I’d be really excited about a bunny or two…of course they are adorable and I love little animals!

Coming up later today: PART 2 of “Advice for Buying Your First Vintage Camper”, where I go into detail about what to look for and what to avoid when looking at a potential camper project. Lots of pictures! Stay tuned!

Portland Composting System © Cloacina

As Nick found out when researching for his TEDx Canberra talk on how to save the world with humanure, it’s hard to find good pictures of poo. You may not believe it, but not many folks draw poo very well. Nor the nutrient cycles they interface with. Enter arts collective Cloacina!

Am I the only one who gets excited about beautiful posters of composting toilet systems? Surely not. But then, I get excited about any regenerative system that’s described really well in an evocative way. Particularly in a visual way. With watercolours.

So we just received our complete edition of Cloacina’s poster works in the post. They. are. awesome. I can’t wait to mount them and hang them up in the woolshed. And perfect christmas gifts for the (not sure who, insert here) who has everything…

The Nitrogen Cycle © Cloacina

Toilets of the world. © Cloacina

Prominent Decomposers. © Cloacina

Aerobic Decomposition © Cloacina

Portland Sewer System © Cloacina

Portland Composting System © Cloacina

In addition to their fab poster work, it looks like Cloacina is continuing to make art projects around humanure, nutrients and waste streams. You know you’ve really made it in the art world when you find yourself attending the National Eco-toilet summit. Seriously, that summit would be fascinating.

• Cloacina blog
• Cloacina composting greenhouse project
• Cloacina website where you too can get these great posters

Incidentally, in Roman mythology, Cloacina (Latin, cloaca: “sewer” or “drain”) was the goddess who presided over the Cloaca Maxima (“Great Drain”), the main trunk of the system of sewers in Rome. She was originally derived from Etruscan mythology.

As well as controlling sewers, she was also a protector of sexual intercourse in marriage. Despite her Etruscan origins, she later became identified with Venus – source: wikipedia.

Definitely related posts:

• Nick’s TEDx Canberra talk on humanure
• The most lovable loo in the west
• New community Gardens poster (free download)

© Retracad http://www.retracad.com.au

Perhaps you can tell at a glance why I am so excited by this photo? I’ll tell you. We have a humanure compost toilet system built on wheelie bins. We love it. But the place we want to use the finished, composted humanure is over the hill from the toilet block.

At the moment, we’re loading full wheelie bins of humanure onto the back of the Milkwood truck and shipping it over the hill. It works as a system, but it isn’t ideal. Maybe these wheelie bin trailers will hold the answer!

Wheelie bins in use in our humanure toilet block. A great solution, but heavy when they're full!

Wheelie bins of humanure, composting happily at the back of the Milkwood Farm toilet block. But how best to get them over the hill to their final destination?

© Retracad http://www.retracad.com.au

© Retracad http://www.retracad.com.au

It might well be that one of these contraptions (designed to transporting wheelie bins of rubbish I imagine) would be a much better idea for our wheelie bin humanure toilets than our current plan that involves winches and skids to crank wheelie bins up onto the truck.

What a great idea! I’m excited.

If you are also excited by wheelie bin trailers (I understand if you’re not, but if you are), here’s some leads:

• The Bin Buggy (made in Victoria) – Retracad
• Wheelie Bin Trailers FaceBook page
• Wheelie bin trolleys – Metal Innovations

Possibly (if you like wheelie bins or humanure) related posts:

• Compost Toilet specifics: the wheelie bins
• The most lovable loo in the west
• Nick Ritar’s TEDx Talk on humanure

What? No more food for Scott? But who will make our favorite iPhone games if he starves?!?

Nothing quite so drastic.

So as part of basic fiscal discipline, I like to keep six months of money in the bank for emergencies. I had a goal when I quit my corporate job at AT&T last year that I would return from Burning Man in early September with that money. I accomplished that goal, and am proud of it. Since then, though, that number has continued to go down. My iPhone gaming business is slowly getting traction, but it’s not enough to support me yet. I’m selling my Honda, which has been part of the plan since the beginning, so it doesn’t get me above six months.

So I looked at my budget and identified the biggest expense beyond my mortgage. And what is it? My Food and Entertainment budget. Just for shits and giggles, I tried changing it to zero.

I was back above Six Months! Beautiful. The only remaining problem is, how do I eat for the next six months?

Well, it turns out I’m in the process of moving out of my 600 sq. ft. master suite into a 144 sq. ft. room, largely to prepare myself for planned long-term RV stays in an RV I don’t have yet. For fun, I’m going to set up the room like the inside of an RV, complete with galley and maybe a shower and toilet. Maybe a *humanure* toilet! But I digress.

If you consider how much shit can fit into 600 sq. ft., and how much will fit into 144 sq. ft., you’ll notice that they *aren’t* *the* *same*. And that’s where my food will come from. From spare hard drives. From extra tables.

From extraneous bass clarinets.

I recently purchased a kit from Man Vs. Debt, Adam Baker’s great site on downsizing one’s possessions and financial obligations. With it’s info on how to sell things on Craigslist, Ebay, and Amazon, I should be able to earn enough to feed myself every week. Maybe not for six months, but once I get rid of all my stuff, I’ll re-evaluate.

WE COMPOST IT!!!

We got a bunch of sawdust from a musical instrument warehouse up in Seattle and that is what we mix with our poop, to counter the wetness.  We add about the same amount of sawdust as we poop.

We have 2 5gallon buckets.  We pooh (and sometimes pee) in one–this bucket is filled about a third with sawdust to start it off, then a few scoops are added each time it is used until it is full.  The other bucket is for pee, which is treated differently because it is wetter.  To start with, we fill the bucket most of the way up with sawdust, then as we pee in it, we add a little sawdust to top it off.

Both buckets, when full, go to the same place.  A pallet box, with pallet bottom, and 4 pallet sides, and a piece of plywood on the top to cover from rain.  To start with, we filled the compost pile with old straw, almost all the way to the top.  As a bucket is full, we dump it on top of the straw, spread it out with a stick, and cover it with more straw.  The poop and pee buckets, pack down the straw as we go, and we keep adding straw and buckets.

Capacity.  Four adults use this system, and I think the buckets fill up about every other day.  So it gets to be a lot of work, emptying and cleaning out the buckets all the time.  But everyone should learn to deal with their own shit!

Time.  I have left this home since writing this, so I don’t know how the compost pile is going, how long they plan on composting it before adding it around fruit trees, etc.  But eventually they will have to put it in wheel barrows and feed it to perennials.  Energy.

In Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama the composting toiletes were big deep pits, full of swarming maggots/larva, and we didn’t have to add sawdust (or a similar material) and there was no need to compost it or move it…….Just this past weekend I visited the Bullocks Brothers Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island.  They did something similar, they dug deep pits, had an outhouse structure over top them, we added sawdust, then when the pits were full, they covered them, and dug another pit elsewhere.  This gave rich nutrients to the soil, deep down, slowly released, in that area.  Seems like a better idea, in terms of not having to move small batches of poop around, just moving the pits to different location.

Right now, I poop in a 5 gallon bucket I keep tucked away in the woods.  I just bury it in the woods, high enough away from the water table of course.  My final bucket before I leave this home, I plan to inoculate with King Stropharia mycelium!  I wont get to see how it turns out but hopefully I can convince someone to check on it in a few months and not find it too weird….

I know this post is kind of random but it happened and now I’m posting it…..

First off before you pour anything down the drain, It could probably  go in the compost. For instance, the remnants of drinks, cooking fluids. Old grease and oil. Compost piles love this stuff. Meat scrap and bone. Paper towels get a thumbs up in the kitchen because they compost so well. Butter wrappers do well. All the regulars of course. I can even get rid off quite a few paper plates.

Actually all the aforementioned could be composted even if you weren’t composting humanure. you might have to change how you were composting though, I wouldn’t want to throw those things in a tumbler. You know  one of the things that kept me from composting for a long time was thinking I needed a tumbler, of course no way was I going to buy one, I was going to build it. Never got done.  Forget turning your pile. Add to, bury and cook.

Bulk has a lot to do with heat in the compost pile. build the bulk with leaves or hay or straw, horse barn shavings, etc.  I like to think of the compost pile as a recipe similar to bread. Flour as the bulk, and the other ingredients folded in to make it work and rise. Those ingredients equaling everything that needs to be buried in the bulk.

A farmer piles hay and it may combust by accident.

One of the nice end results of composting  is the lessened trash and what trash I do accumulate is plastic. If you think taking out your water toilet was radical, try stop using plastic.

Plastic,  the answer for plastic and it’s already moving that way, is that it becomes biodegradable then it will be composted along with all the rest.

Paper, I see alchemy in paper. I try to recycle as much paper as i can through the garden. brown cardboard and newspaper are pretty easy, some other papers not so easy. At a a municipal scale the recycling of paper is for the most part barely cost efficient. When paper is viewed as a organic cover,  it becomes a much needed part of a recipe.

One of the main purposes of this post though is for folks that are trying to get the heat up in their compost pile. Make sure your capturing all your organics including liquids, build bulk,  that might help.

Total Organic capture. Kitchen Revolution. Renaissance.

Recently Nick gave a talk at TEDx Canberra. He talked about stewarding nutrients, how we can solve the problem of peak phosphorous, and about how to grow the best cumquats ever.

Yes, Nick was talking about why taking responsibility for our poo and our wee, our most basic waste streams, is so crucial to our future. For a long time, a mark of superiority in some cultures has been how far you can get your shit away from you. But now, we need it back.

Sewage cycle. © Cloacina

Potential humanure cycle. © Cloacina

Originally, Nick wanted to do this talk on straight-up Permaculture. But then he started thinking – what is the most pertinent metaphor for Permaculture, the most glaring example of the problem being the solution? And he just couldn’t go past our most basic nutrient cycle.

When we first moved to Milkwood, we had to quickly make a choice of how to deal with our shit. We’d just read The Humanure Handbook, so the choice was pretty easy. Create a simple DIY composting toilet system.

As things progressed here, we realized just how nutrient-deficient our soils were, and how much potential arrived (literally) within every person that came to Milkwood, that could help us restore healthy soils on this farm.

And we’ve been collecting it ever since. The poo in our super duper wheelie bin compost toilet system, and the urine in our converted water tank urinal. The urine drains to a big drum, which then gets diluted and sprayed on our fields as a natural fertilizer, full of nitrogen and phosphorous.

The poo goes into a 9-month maturation process (i.e. it sits in the wheelie bin with lots of carbon and compost worms) after which point it gets used in our tree planting projects. It’s the most amazing, nutrient rich, safe compost you could dream of.

The humanure composting toilets at Milkwood Farm

Once they're full, each bin of poo and carbon (usually woodchip) gets rolled out and sits for 9 months. At the end of this process, you have a large bin of kick-ass compost.

Inside one of our compost toilet cubicles.

So why are we still stuck in a archaic view that these nutrients cannot be the best thing ever for our trees, for our garden, when managed properly? Why do we persist with the idea that is it’s shit, then it will forever stink? Functional natural systems just don’t work like that.

Like anything, compost toilet systems can be done very well, and they can also be done extremely badly. Knowledge is the main barrier here. But guess what? We have the knowledge! It’s there! It’s been done! We’ve been making great compost with manure of many types for as long as we’ve been farming!

It seems entirely nutty to me that we as a society would choose to pump all this nutrient out to sea instead, where it does nobody any good, and many people and other organisms quite a bit of harm.

And then we instead manufacture, at great expense and with massive carbon emissions, our fertilizer, before trucking it all over the country and sending farmers broke with input costs while depleting our soils. When the best darn stuff is right here. Like RIGHT here.

Anyway. Nick said it better than I can. But I do ask you to consider, if it is within your power (and believe me, it is) , how you can step up and steward those nutrients of yours.

Because some important answers to our future food security, especially on a domestic and local scale, are within you.

Humanure and Compost Toilet resources:

• The Humanure Handbook – by Joseph Jenkins
• Humanure.net
• Humanure forums
• Holy Shit – Managing Manure to Save Mankind – by Gene Logsdon
• www.cloacina.org – source of the excellent diagrams above (you can buy them as posters!)

Possibly related posts at Milkwood.net:

• The most lovable loo in the west
• Compost toilet specifics: the wheelie bins
• How to build a worm tower

In my previous post I outlined the current design for the Bechtel Environmental Classroom at the MacLeish Field Station. Due to the brevity of the post, I touched upon many interesting and complex aspects of the design but failed to fully explain their significance in the context of satisfying the imperatives of the project (as outlined by the Living Building Challenge). In my next couple posts I plan on elaborating upon some of these innovative systems, more specifically clarifing how they function and their specific role in the design. Today I will be focusing on a highly essential portion of the design, the choice to incorporate composting toilets instead of traditional flush or dual flush toilets.

Throughout the history of human civilization we have designed and utilized a variety of human waste disposal systems, ranging from the latrine and privy in early civilizations, to the flush toilet, dual-flush toilet, and composting toilet of the modern age. Due to imperative value of water as a limited natural resource, many contemporary environmental designers and planners consider composting toilets the gold standard for human waste disposal systems. However, although composting of food scraps and plant material has gained enormous acceptance throughout much of the developed world, many people remain hesitant to make the jump to composting human wastes as well.

In brief, composting toilets are structures that utilize microbes to decompose human wastes for use as a nutrient-rich soil additive for ornamental or edible landscapes, acting to transform a traditionally thought of “waste” into a “resource”. They range considerably in aesthetic, from the sleek white models that mimic traditional toilets, to rustic, handmade varieties. Nevertheless, they all attempt to copy the environment of a forest floor, which decomposes animal wastes to produce valuable nutrients for the surrounding vegetation, or humus. Additionally, these systems require little to no water, drastically reducing the overall water and financial burden of a building.

 The average American uses 74 gallons of water a day, a third of which goes directly into operating toilets, about 25 gallons.

Maintenance of composting toilets are quite minimal, requiring only periodic additions of coarse carbon-based bulking materials (i.e. sawdust, dry leaves) in addition to removal of the seasoned humus at the base of the composting chambers every 6-12 months depending on intensity of use.

One person using a composting toilet would produce about 80 pounds of humus and save more than 6,600 gallons of water per year. 

Joseph Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook, calls the fear that humanure is unsafe for agricultural or ornamental use “fecophobia”. He acknowledges the potential for humanure to carry pathogens, but explains that this potential is directly linked to the state of health of the individuals that are producing the excrement. Scientific analysis of samples taken from composting toilets have found that adequate time (minimum of a few months) and temperatures generally will make human manure safe to use, even though many local laws refuse to acknowledge this fact. For example, many states still require the end product of a composting toilet system to be removed form the site by a sewage hauler or buried under 6 inches of soil.

This all being said, it is very exciting that the Bechtel Environmental Classroom design team has chosen to include composting toilets in this project. I look forward to seeing this highly sustainable system in action, and hope that by exposing students and faculty to this alternative, it will begin to become more accepted and encouraged at a larger scale.

-Jessa Finch (’12)

CEEDS MacLeish Intern

But at the Casbah we took this to the extreme. During the first year of the Casbah (when G.I. Joe) was there we composted our food before and after eating it, yes we composted our shit. Majesty read a book all about humanure.

After that book we began composting our shit and piss. In order to do that we had to shit in a bucket. And in order to keep this low key we had to hide it from G.I. Joe in our rooms. We would switch from week to week if it was in my room or Majesty’s room. But we did have a bucket of poop in our rooms. And we did shit in our rooms.

There was always the awkward moments when you would walk into your room only to find someone taking a shit in it. You had to wait until they stopped, hoped that they weren’t to gassy and then you could go into your room.

At first we had to sit on the edge of a bucket in order to poop, not the most pleasant experience. Then we upgraded to a full toilet, that was very enjoyable, almost like pooping in a bathroom but with extra amenities. After you shit in a bucket all you have to do was sprinkle some sawdust over your poop and the sawdust absorbs all the smell. And you are collecting some grade a nutrients for your soil.

Speaking of the soil I actually just got to shovel through that soil. The garden has been destroyed and is being replaced by grass, but the compost was a huge success. Nearly all of the food has completely decomposed, the only thing left was coconuts, some bones, egg shells and avocado shells. Other than that there is grade a dirt.

And the poop? Yep it completely decomposed. Here is a picture of what was once hundreds of pounds of vegetables and shit, in a small pile of excellent soil.

My own journey has been one from processed white bread, bologna and boxed macaroni with ‘cheese food’, to food-based beauty and skin care, to shopping organically, to discovering my definition of ‘whole foods’, to growing and making things myself and shopping for items as close to their source as possible.

 As a person winds their way through the curves of discovering and implementing sustainability, it becomes less of a ‘level’ issue and more of a holistic thought issue.  As the Australian-born permaculture concept displays so clearly: little waste = little outside input.  The way we think about ‘waste’ in our culture is very wasteful indeed.

So I’ll just cut to chase in this instance.  You’ve all read the title, you all know where this post is going.  You may suspect what is about to hit the fan.

Aside from things like plastic cups, styrofoam bowls, paper plates, car batteries, toaster ovens and CDs, the thing known as “human waste” commonly refers to excrement; our poop and urine.  The term is quite fitting when these by-products of digestion are discarded (into landfills, into incinerators, into our water supply), when people think that when we flush it simply goes ‘away’.  But when the concept of recycling these things is harnessed, “humanure” can be one of our richest organic resources.

One of the tenets of a holistic view is the concept of cycles.  For humans, eating and digestion are both part of a cycle.  Other steps include enriching the soil, growing the food, discarding the post-digestion materials and, in the case of a broken cycle, wasting and polluting.  But in the case of a healthy, intact cycle, (the re-cycling aspect that keeps it all going) is to compost, and return to the soil that which we have taken from it.

Without going into great detail, I am not talking about the “night soil” that parts of Asia are infamous for (the spreading of raw human manure over agricultural fields) which is a known pathogen-spreading method.  But fully composted (meaning combined with adequate dry, absorbent material, and allowed to stand for at least a year with internal temperatures reaching at least 113F) humanure can be a rich source of (FREE) organic matter and (FREE) minerals, like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus plus calcium and carbon.  Done correctly and well, not a trace of pathogens or harmful bacteria will exist in the finished, composted humanure.

While I’ve used outdoor latrines and squatted in the bushes many times, a compost toilet (as opposed to a ‘composting toilet’, which is the entire system – often quite expensive to assimilate or install) seems to me the best option for stewardship of our resources and ‘micro-husbandry’.  Latrines are a good idea in light of not wasting by flushing, but often carry the dangers of polluting ground water.  Squatting in the bushes, as any dog-walker will attest, is favorite of nitrogen-loving weeds like dandelions.

This simple compost toilet looks much like its cousin, but doesn’t get clogged up or spill over onto the bathroom floor when it’s upset.  As long as you can haul a 20-pound bucket from your bathroom to your compost pile this is a smoothly running system.

First you take a bucket, then you think about how you want to sit over the bucket and you construct a seat (in this case, it looks very similar to a regular toilet.  You then find some absorbent material (weed matter, dry vegetable scraps, cocoa fiber, rice hulls, sawdust – just not from pressure-treated wood which contains chromated copper arsenate, a known cause of cancer and not something you want to end up in your food garden) and keeping a supply nearby, like in another bucket next to the toilet, you line the bottom of the toilet bucket with 2-3 inches of the material to get a good absorbent layer started.  Then each time you use the toilet, simply cover your deposits with another fine layer of material and you’re good to until the bucket gets full and you exchange it for another clean bucket while you take that one out to the compost pile.

When composting the bucket contents, you want to have another good layer of absorbent, dry material covering the bottom and dug out, kind of like a bowl for you to toss the raw humanure into.  Cover that with another absorbent layer (all these absorbent layers are your carbon sources.  The human excrement is high in nitrogen and would take for-stinky-ever to break down and compost; you ideally want a ratio of 30:1, carbon:nitrogen in any compost pile.)  Once you have added consistently to this pile for a year, let it alone and start another pile so this one can get up to temperature and have time to break down, cool down and finish the composting (and disease- and pathogen-killing) process.

You are now ready to use your (FREE) humanure as you would any other compost throughout your garden, ornamental bed or orchard.  Congratulations, you have closed that loop and completed the cycle.

A Few Facts:

The Humanure Handbook, by Joseph Jenkins

-10,000 landfills have closed since 1982; 20% of these are the hazardous waste-contaminated Superfund sites.
-Older, unlined landfills can have a groundwater contamination area of 3.4 miles or more
-Organic materials thrown into landfills are the greatest contributors to global methane emissions; goodbye ozone layer.
-In the west, most of the water we defecate into is purified drinking water
-67% of the world’s households don’t have running water
-Americans use 340 billion gallons of water every day
-In 2000, 55% of US lakes, rivers and estuaries were not clean enough for fishing or swimming according to the EPA
-By flushing soil nutrients down the pipes, we increase our need for agricultural fertilizer – otherwise known as synthetic chemicals.  And so, erosion, nutrient run-off and excessive or incorrect use of these synthetic fertilizers is the largest diffuse source of water pollution.

I mention this more to exemplify that main stream thinking is examining this process.

I am directing my efforts to develop a program and or business that would go to schools or municipalities and ultimately leave in place a service that would collect and compost all their organics from kitchen to bathroom.

         The scope isn’t just the toilet but the whole waste stream. Realizing with nature around us that our waste is our most valuable resource. Not waste at all then.

The origins of alchemy was about trying to make something not valuable into something valuable. Specifically common ore into gold. Don’t think we’ve got that one done yet. We can print lots of cash though.

Interesting to me was when I did a word search on alchemy, it traces back to another name for Egypt meaning “black earth not desert sand.”

I planted my potatoes several different ways. Mostly subtle variations I talked about in previous posts. The potatoes that we’re planted with soil did tend to do better than those laid on paper or cardboard and covered with hay. I will continue to experiment with the newspaper and hay method though. It comes from a good source Bill Mollison, and this was my first time planting that way. My potato patch turned out only OK maybe doubling my seed.

I got introduced to two new pests this year, both of them in my winter and summer squash. The squash vine borer and the squash bug.

the squash vine borer are from eggs laid by a moth which produces the worm that bores into the vine near the base of the plant. My first indication was reddish orange, gook is the scientific word I think, at the base of the plant where he bored in. you can cut into the vine and retrieve the little guy and cover up the wounded stem with dirt to combat them.

Then  there was the squash bug, you don’t want them. I would regularly wipe their eggs from the leaves and would suck them up with a small canister vacuum then dump them in water. They eventually took all my squash though my last acorn squash just recently. They prefer squash over other cucurbit but can infest them as well as tomatoes. Neem Oil would be an organic remedy. I’ll be ready for them next time. Probably consider squash as a trap crop.

My melons are thriving and though I had quite a bit of blossom end rot  on the tomatoes, they seem to have recovered and doing well. The name blossom end rot kind of makes you think that it would be a moisture problem but from what I read  it could come from either too wet or  too dry conditions and a calcium deficiency in the soil. I tossed a hundred green tomatoes or so before it cleared up.

My corn got attacked by Japanese beetles. Silk eaters. I’m familiar with them but they had never got on my corn before. Must’ve liked something else i had better like grapes or raspberries. I just picked them off by hand. I had four plantings of corn. The first two I fed twice. Once with horse manure tea soon after it emerged and then with chicken manure tea as it was tasseling.  The last two plantings I only fed once, the horse manure tea shortly after emergence and  then skipped the chicken manure tea at tasseling. The first two crops were definitely superior. Now all the corn stalks are gone  and are being composted, not in the humanure pile though. I’ve started planting field peas and limas  in the rows where they were.

I really like though  the add to garden as opposed to plowing and tilling.  Hardly any weeding has been involved. That’s big. Moving on now with the fall garden. We have pumpkin, okra, field peas, more tomatoes, peppers  and egg plant started, cauliflower and several more things waiting their time.

More on composting and blacksmithing  coming.

Oh yeah did you hear Bill Gates has a 40 million dollar grant offered to reinvent the toilet?  Peace to you.

old corn rows now feild peas

melons