(Untitled)

[the_wanderer]

On Wednesday I ordered "The Humanure Handbook", Wild Fermentation, Nourishing Traditions, A Pattern Language, Putting Food By and a pickling book for $10 that Amazon recommended.

My life is about to get much better. Far and away, Wild Fermentation is the most anticipated of them all.

When I'm back in Minnesota in December, I plan on disassembling and

Comments

[bluesbodger]

I've been entertaining a strange notion this week: What if flush toilets aren't as bad as I've always thought? I understand and wholly endorse all the arguments about a waste of clean drinking water, flushing nutrients down the river instead of back into the soil where they belong, and generally making the baby Jesus cry. At the individual scale, I heartily endorse outhouses and plan to use one on my hypothetical future Ten Acres Of Orchard.

Here's my weird thought, though: For urban-scale waste disposal, is it possible to do better than the current system? It's relatively cheap (where water is, anyway), it scales well, and it's effective at keeping most people's coliforms out of most other people's way. A whole town full of composting toilets calls for either a whole town full of backyard shit-composting piles or a whole fleet of shit-hauling trucks. The backyard option ain't so hot for apartments with no backyard, and the trucks aren't exactly a move toward sustainability. I'm perilously close to concluding that the best bet would

[the_wanderer]

My one problem with outhouses is I don't really like the idea of digging a big hole and filling it with excrement. I want to spread my poop back onto the garden that feeds me.

I think it is possible to do better than the current water powered sewage system we have - I think a whole town of backyard shit composting piles is necessary, as well as a whole town of back and frontyard gardens is. If an apartment complex can have room for several trash dumpsters, shouldn't it also have room for some humanure piles?

What happens to solid waste once it passes through the treatment plant? I toured a facility in like, 5th grade, but I don't remember. Do you know? What happens to the solid sludge?

[bluesbodger]

I should clarify that when I say "outhouse" I basically mean a large-vaulted outdoor composting toilet, which you empty out when it gets full. I think we're on the same page for favoring nutrient reuse.

I think the main options for municipal sewage sludge are to use it as fertilizer or to landfill it. I don't know the numbers on which is most common. The landfilling is obviously stupid, and the fertilizer usage suffers from the problem that it's got whatever heavy metals and other garbage people have been washing into the sewer.

Since I'm prepared to accept the existence of large farms outside the city, I'm also prepared to accept the idea of shipping the sludge back out to the farms. The heavy metals could be dealt with by not letting people dump heavy metals down the sink-the case for full tracking of toxics has been well-made elsewhere.

[josenritno]

Time. Time, time, time. I don't know how to get more either. I'm ALWAYS working, whether it be at work, self employed, doing unpaid work trying to get even more self employed, or working for the sheer fun of it.
I'm learning to budget my time. Like to not work when it's not working time. One of my weekend days I devote to design work to start my printing gig, but I've recently decided to NOT do any of that after work on other days. I just never stop that way. It's like I have to schedule free time where I only do things I want to do right that second.

Of course, if I weren't woking full time, or working at all, I'd probably have just as little time. It's a funny resource that's both totally limited and totally infinite.

I saw listen to the Buddha and not desire more time, but do the best with the time you have.

I hear you man. You want to stage a rebellion and demand more time from life? How about an 8 day week?

[the_wanderer]

My biggest non-work time is my computer time in the evenings. Which I don't think I ought to be spending so much time doing.

Likewise on scheduling "spontaneous free time."

I think an 8 day week would be great.

[_loonatics_]

wild fermentations is one of my favorite books, cook book or otherwise that i've discovered in a long time. In that vein, I'd also recommend Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice. yay for the composting toilet--we plan on building one at our future farm, wherever that may end up being. it does seem pretty idiotic to be flushing potable water literally down the toilet.

[the_wanderer]

Full Moon Feast. I'll look into it. I see that it's published by Chelsea Green - that publishing company amazes me with how many books, on various subjects, that I have read and loved.

I've used a composting toilet while I was in Minneapolis for about 6 months - just did it in my backyard with the rest of my food waste - but I never gardened at that place, so I never got to use it!

You and your partner are renting some land on GOE, right?

[_loonatics_]

I recently went to a talk about Organic Farming Systems in China. The presenter had traveled to China in the 1970's and studied their agricultural systems, which were primarily organic at that time. Everything was re-used and recycled, much of it composted and put back onto the land as their source of fertility (to the extent that they would manually dredge and dig out riverbottoms and ditches every year and compost that! Human waste included. All the waste from the cities was composted by farmers, huge compost piles everywhere, and the human composted waste was called "night soil". Unfortunately this system was quickly chemicalized and they are now stuck with the same problems we are in terms of getting rid of human and animal waste. But it was a great (albeit labor-intensive) model of recycling human waste into soil fertility