Thank you for the link. We love our sawdust/compost toilet. Built it ourselves which is pretty easy. We are updating this spring as we have built on a new bathroom. we do not compost this waste for our veg garden but it is doable. However the flowers I grow with this compost are beautiful. We had volunteer seeds come up in the dumping area and wow...while we did not eat them..they had no insect probs..and stayed green long after my other tomatoe plants got brown from a bit of frost. I do dig tons of earth worms from this dump area also. And transfer them to the garden. teepi
you're welcome. i know for ''humanure handbook'' for a couple of years, but i saw just yesterday that jj have message board. unfortunatelly, nothing yet of my intentional community project, so i'm still involved just theoretically. what a ultimate low technology! i love it. poopheads, unite!
YES, I have been to this site, as well as passed it on to others. I too have read the "Humanure Handbook" and we have recently begun to use our sawdust toilet. It is great!!!! There is no smell, it cleans up easily, and there is a mill down the road that sells us trash bags of saw dust for $2 a piece. We have a composting hole that is brand new, where we dump our bucket when it gets full. We have to put a tarp over it to keep out the snow and excess moisture. One thing that I wanted to post on there was about pine needles. We have an excess of pine needles around here and I would like to use them for composting. Someone told me that they were really acidic and that they may mess up the PH of the pile. Does anyone know about this?
I'm not sure about the pine needles..probably depends on the ratio. But if you are using any saw dust from pine trees it should be the same. We too get most of our saw dust from mills that are all over the woods around here. We know a man who logs alot of hardwoods and has portable mills and he tells us where they are cutting. We give him 20 dollars a year for slab wood to burn in the woodstove for all winter and all the saw dust we can haul. I have used peat moss, but I boycott it now. Also it is so flyaway that the air gets crazy with it when its sprinkled. But it is acidic also. I searched for using pine needles in the toilet but really did not come across much. If you compost the waste with pine though you should be able to use the completed compost around acid loving plants..evergreens, azalea's, etc. You could also mix the pine with something more alkaline to even out the acidity ratio.
Pine needles are VERY acidic. Wood ash and/or lime (I try to use oyster shells - good lime source) can be used in a compost pile to balance the pine straw. Pine straw also packs very tightly, have no seeds and decomposes slowly which makes them better, much better for mulch than leafs or hay or other types of straw. About 60% of my little farm is (pine) tree farm, so I use pine straw A LOT. A couple other things: 1. fire hazard - dry pine straw = gasoline. 2. I try to spend a few days in early December baleing pine straw. "City slickers" will pay $3.50 to $5.00 per bale. Doing it by hand I can average 20 bales per hour. 5 or 6 hours per day for 3 or 4 days pays my yearly water, phone and internet bills. And reduces the fire hazard at the same time - now that's what I call multi-tasking. Peace, poor_old_dad
