Pest control in the composting toilet
"Oh, no, honey, I'd never ask
you to handle humanure," I reassured Mark when we came to the final
stages of negotiation for our composting
toilet. I
could tell he was seething over the term "humanure" (which he considers
sneaky), so I went on. "The system I'm thinking of is designed so
you don't touch the human waste until it's had at least one solid year
to compost. It's really totally safe!"
With some grumbling,
Mark gave in and let me have the composting toilet I'd been campaigning
for. So I expected some snide remarks when I came to him on
Friday for help revising a flaw in the system. The spaces between
the wooden slats (which Mark had said were too far apart, but which I'd
said needed distance for air flow) had allowed a raccoon to reach in
and pull out some half-rotted chicken
entrails, along with
toilet paper and, um, humanure.
There was no "I told you so,"
but only because Mark is a true gentleman (and a long-suffering
husband). I scooped up the debris to stuff back into the
composting chamber while Mark screwed hardware cloth over the offending
holes.
Word to the wise ---
lots of carbon isn't sufficient to keep vermin out of your composting
toilet chamber if you live out in the wilds. The author of The
Humanure Handbook
doesn't mention this problem even though he threw all of his household
food scraps down the hole, but I think he also lived in suburbia where
pesky racoons are probably much less common.
One pest-control option
would be to line the entire chamber with hardware cloth, but that might
rust into a mess in a few years. Another option would be to use
more, smaller boards spaced closer together for the slats so you have
just as much air flow but less space between each board. We'll
wait and see if filling in the most problematic holes with hardware
cloth is sufficient, and I may go back to plan B, which keeps anything
food-like out of the compost chamber. I'll keep you posted.
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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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We have bears. We still haven't set up a proper system, but have recently acquired a solar electric fencing unit for the purpose. A bear recently punctured (with teeth) the plastic gas tank on my woodchipper. And I hear stories from the locals that any tree fruit other than apples will succumb to bears when they try to climb the trees to get the fruit. So more electric fencing . . . But they do love the humanure!
I don't know to what extent it is just boredom and curiosity with the bears. They just rummage a bit. I know that bears are drawn by insect larvae, so I don't know if that influences the humanure rummaging. But nothing else is composted with the waste - and we use forest leaves as the main carbon mass cover (with a few fresh wood chips occasionally, when we need an air freshener.)
Food scraps mostly go into the poultry pen. We a compost heap with grasses, weeds, and poultry litter down by the garden that occasionally gets some vegetable waste. And the actual outhouse itself hasn't had any bear problems (the previous owner had bees for 5 years with no problems from bears - then one day a mother and cub came through and ended that venture. It wasn't electrified.) Definitely a learning curve, living with bears.