Eleven months of the composting toilet
One of our Egyptian
onion winners
included a note asking for an update on our composting
toilet.
I'd actually been meaning to write a post on the topic, but it's
really more of a Mark post than an Anna post --- there's not much
to say when things just work. But Mark is still not entirely
excited by the idea of humanure (although he does agree our new
system is better than our old one), so hopefully you will all
forgive a bit of a light post from me on the weekend.
Keeping
wildlife out of the excrement has been the only real problem with our composting
toilet. After Mark added tin to the sides last winter, we
didn't see another problem until last week when something reached
through one of the few cracks still exposed. We'll cover
that opening up soon, and will definitely cover all the gaps
before moving to the next hole this fall. I had originally
thought the compost chamber needed those openings for aeration,
but there seems to be plenty of air flow through the open seat and
smaller cracks without leaving big gaps between the wooden walls
(as was proven by the sniff
test). I've seen a few flies hanging around, but not
even as many as are in the chicken pastures, so I figure our
sawdust covering is doing its job well there.
The size of the
composting chamber seems to have been perfect for the two of us
--- the goal is to fill one chamber every year so that by the time
we use up the third chamber, the first is ready to empty.
Our original chamber started looking pretty full a month or two
again, but summer weather also prompted rapid decomposition, so
the contents have sunk down at the same rate we've added to
them. We've used up an entire bin full of sawdust to fill this chamber,
meaning that our finished compost will actually consist primarily
of rotted sawdust and will presumably be quite good around the
base of trees.
I guess I had more to
say about humanure than I thought I did. Who knew!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Anna Do you plan to use any of your humanure on any vegetables? I have read a few web articles on the subject it seems the verdict is split whether this is good or bad idea. I know you have to make sure it reaches a certain internal temp and some say to wait over a year. etc.
Anonymous --- We have so many fruit trees, where it's much safer to apply the humanure, that I don't think we'll need to put any on the vegetables. I'd definitely be a lot more careful if I was going to put it around vegetables. I figure if the compost sits in the chamber for a full year, then I apply it around the base of fruit trees in the fall and mulch over it, by the time any fruits could possibly land on the ground, pathogens will be long gone.
This is all in the future, though. The first chamber will be shut off sometime this month, and then we'll have to wait until fall 2014 to get any humanure. A long wait!
Anna What about rabbit manure? Do you have all the worries you do with other types of animal manure? I have read you can apply it directly to the garden soil.