Well composted humanure is one of the most excellent tree planting resources you can have, on a site like ours.
So much so that, when we clear out the Humanure Hacienda once a year, it’s compost is reserved specifically for helping new and precious trees to grow…
This is what shit looks like after a year in a Humanure composting system. It is woody compost, full of earthworms.
It smells like good soil. It is totally safe, all pathogen cycles relating to the manure have broken many months ago.
It has composted for 12 months in the sun and the wind and the rain. It is full of microbial life. It ends up like any other animal manure, when properly dealt with.
It is a valuable resource for creating resilience and abundance in rough country like ours.
One that is worth identifying and using – not flushed away to some submerged tank, or pumped out to the sea.
This ‘Humanure Hacienda’ is the system connected to the ‘lovable loo’ compost toilet in the tinyhouse, which you can read all about here. It’s super simple, and extremely effective.
It’s now a year since we moved into the tinyhouse, and each of the two Hacienda bays are designed to hold the humanure of a small family for one year.
So at this time of year, we unload the bay that has been composting for 12 months, which lines up nicely with tree planting season.
It’s straight down to the emerging holistic orchard for this black gold. A couple of shovels in each tree planting hole will help get our pear trees growing beautifully…
You can read all about our posts on Humanure here. Worth looking into if you’re living somewhere that you can try out your own closed-loop humanure system.
The benefits are many and the way we see it, it’s responsible living at it’s most fundamental.
>> More posts on nutrient cycling here
Thanks Floyd and Nick for digging the goodness!
The title of this blogpost is a line nicked from our friend Charlie’s funky album Permaculture: a rhymer’s manual.
Thanks for the update. It’s really worth looking into once we’re past the ick factor. I don’t know, city slickers hey. I took your advice this summer, well Ashers advice, pee’d in pot, mixed it 10 to 1. Used it on all our flowers, hanging baskets and potted Bamboo. Result – best season of flowers and growth ever. Of course we also had the best summer in Manchester for 17 years in my opinion with lots of sunshine too. The plants took off once I added that special brew though. I told a friend who visited, that we had used… Read more »
Very good. What are you using for your biological sponge material? You say it is “woody” when finished so are you using woodchips? (We use leaf mold so it does not end up “woody”.)
Hey there, we use sawdust from a nearby mill. It’s awesome, great coverage and the small particle size means great compost!
You guys are so blessed to be able to recycle this way. We are building and council wouldn’t even consider it!!!! We are so dissapointed!
Could you not put in what the council want then set up a composting toilet next to it or on its place. Some people have both so guests can chose. We are buying a house on a new development and the won’t coincider it either but our loveable loo will be coming with us anyway.
I’ve always thought it crazy that we make this great free fertiliser and literally flush it away, then buy in manufactured fertiliser for our gardens and farms. It’s truly bizarre.
Hi Kirsten! Thanks for this post. It doesn’t look scarey at all! Any chance for a post on the wheelie bins and how they compost down – do they work just as well? Do you have to do more to them? Cheers
I’m just starting a humanure system..it’s a little strange and takes time to overcome the socially brainwashing that has been done….it is a little bothersome each week when I need to walk it to the bin area….alas…so it’s a lesson in being in the now…and i am always grateful that I am not party to wasting2-4 gals of precious drinking water every time I need to let my personal waste go….
Good onya. Yeah emptying the buckets is not a job that makes me go ‘oh god YES’ when I do it… but then, neither does the washing up, or cleaning the bathroom. But these jobs need to be done, for things to be healthy in my little home. And we’re the happier for it, i rekon.
“There’s no such thing as waste, only stuff in the wrong place”. With a lyric like this, Formidable Vegetable Sound System should be up for some sort of award.
Only if the poor morons of India uderstood this . . . they would have cleaner streets, better sanitation, and orchards! Education! The right education, applied at the right time in the right place.
That’s a bit harsh isn’t it Bruce? Referring to the poor of India as “morons”. We don’t employ such sensible systems here in Australia. Our waste is magically piped from our houses to places unknown but occasionally smelt and despised where it is then intensively and chemically treated. Why not humanure for the West? Why not humanure in the cities?
Remember that Reinvent the Toilet Challenge? Won by some piece of technology – that isn’t without its benefits – rather than something so simple and obvious as a composting loo.
… Further, the Solar Toilet isn’t set to be on the ground until December 2013 and the prototype comes with a $2,200USD price tag. As I wrote on my blog today, I could zip down to Bunnings this afternoon and knock 40 together for that price.
This is the first time I’ve read about such a composting scheme as humanure.
We have a fancy urine diverting toilet and put our bucket of solids out about once a fortnight. It’s nearly a year old and I’m longing for the day when our first batch is ready (in another year) to go on our fruit trees. Such a neat and brilliant system, wish more people would embrace the ‘no such thing as waste’ motto.
So, when I say that Tony Abbott is a waste of space, he is in actual fact someone who is just in the wrong place?
Ha!
hey you guys are the best, i have two questions to ask yo. 1, do you use eucalypt sawdust? and 2, do you need to moisten your piles in the summer?
Yes, and no. 🙂
Hi Kirsten, I’m making these. Bread tray cut up with an anglegrinder in place of the steel mesh, and old plant pots to keep it off the floor. And hotglue is useful to hold it all together. Just wanted to ask if air supply makes a difference to the composting speed or temperature – e.g. I’m thinking of drilling holes in the wheelie bin below the mesh (but above the tap of course) to let air get drawn through the compost from below. Or would this simply let smells out? And does it help if you fit a perforated pipe… Read more »
well if you drill holes you’ll let other things in too – flies etc – best thing i would say for composting would be to add some compost worms when the bins are maybe 1/4 full – it is a slow compost, and more akin to aged manure with lots of woody material when you turn the bins out. if you want to make super-duper humanure compost, the humanure hacienda is the thing i’ve seen that’s delivered the best compost. By the way, I just updated the images on this post, which seemed to have broken. dont know if that… Read more »