Dealing With My Own Sh–

I’d like to keep this a family friendly blog, but what else should I call it?  Feces? Excrement? Waste? Poo?

Old three holer on our property. I still can’t reckon with the family dynamics involved in using this. Was this ever discussed in Little House on the Prairie?

They all sound too distant, clinical or childish.   It’s so easy to refer to it in euphemisms when clean water washes it far away, into rivers, oceans, or sewage treatment plants.  But when you have to figure out how to deal with it yourself, it turns to shit.

I could look on the more productive side and call it humanure, as Joseph Jenkins does in The Humanure Handbook (promoted as “255 pages of crap”).  This, incidentally, should be required reading in all Civics classes.  After all, civic life rests on people deciding (and sometimes disagreeing) on how and where to dispose of bodily wastes.

Living off-grid,  without the benefits (or downsides) of a public sewage system, we had to devise our own system for humanure.

Instead of a pit latrine, like the three-holer next to the old homestead, we decided to go with a simple, cheap, effective, and sustainable method – a five gallon bucket with a toilet seat on top.  Joseph Jenkins describes this composting system with passion and eloquence.  Unlike pit latrines, it doesn’t contaminate groundwater, give off noxious odors or attract flies.   A scoop of sawdust on each deposit makes it a fairly pleasant place to sit (especially when the user has a nice view as well).

Our system is due for an upgrade (a better frame for the toilet seat and a partial enclosure for privacy), but we like the basic idea and the view.

Of course, the bucket does fill up and has to be emptied on a compost pile.  I’ll admit, that’s not my favorite job.   But the manure mixed with sawdust dumps out pretty cleanly and with few smells.   I’d rather do this once a week than plunge out the flush toilet back in Portland (which seems to clog at least that often, if not more) or mop up overflows.

Best of all, our humanure compost will one day feed our flowers (we’ll let cows, rabbits, and chickens feed our food plants) rather than polluting our water supply.