How It Works: Composting Toilet

System Purpose.  Receive and recycle humanure.

How It Works Summary.  Sawdust covered humanure hauled in buckets to outdoor bin and composted for two years before applying to garden.   All details can be found in Joseph Jenkin’s Humanure Handbook.

System Cost.  $1,000 including installation.  Our less elegant first model, used in the shed before the house was built, cost $100.  No major replacement costs.

System Components

Toilet like any other toilet, except ours is elegantly constructed of cherry and deploys a bucket rather than a watery bowl to receive humanure. 

Sawdust, the “water” of the composting toilet, minimizes odor and unsightliness, while adding valuable compostable material.   With a couple scoops, we “flush” with sawdust rather than clean water.  “Cover Your Stuff” says the butterfly adorning the attached sawdust bin.   This bin holds 15 gallons of sawdust which we obtain from an artist friend who turns beautiful wooden bowls and didn’t know what to do with all his sawdust until we came along.  Since running out of sawdust is the only failure mode (and a very serious one at that), we try to keep a 30 gallon barrel full at all times.    If the sawdust is too dry it generates dust when scooped.  To avoid dust we mix in a little water before filling the sawdust bin.  In theory, any scoop-able and compostable material could be used. 

5 gallon buckets for collecting, storing and transporting the sawdust-covered humanure.   The bucket replaces the toilet bowl , drain pipes and miles of sewer pipe of the conventional toilet system.  One bucket fits snugly beneath the toilet seat and is replaced with a clean bucket when full.    To replace the full bucket, simply lift the hinged top of the toilet, remove full bucket, replace with empty bucket and close.  Our black buckets hide the “skid” marks.    When four full buckets accumulate in the garage, we carry to compost bin where they are dumped, scrubbed, rinsed and dried.  Thus the sawdust toilet system does require two gallons of water per week for cleaning buckets.  We collect this water off the shed roof.  A standard toilet brush works well for scrubbing buckets followed by a spray bottle rinse.   Rinsed buckets hang upside down in the sun to dry.  The now clean buckets are lined with dried grass (to reduce splatter and ease dumping) then returned to the garage to await use in the toilet.

Compost Bin capable of processing two years worth of humanure.    The compost bin, which we call the "hacienda", replaces the sewage treatment facility of the conventional toilet system.  Our two-bin system requires no turning.   Bin size depends on number of people generating humanure and length of non-composting season (cold winter).  Our bins measures 5’ x 5’, easily large enough to process and store one year’s worth of humanure for our family of two in cold climate Minnesota.     The center bin stores straw and hay for covering the compost.   The cover minimizes odor and flies, while permitting vital oxygen to enter the composting process.   A bin is used for a year, then allowed to rest  for a year before emptying onto garden and used again.  The amount of garden compost produced is always less than hoped, perhaps only 10 cubic feet per year per humanure generator.   

System Maintenance.  Replace full bucket with empty bucket (1 bucket per person every 4 days).   Clean full buckets (Every four buckets seems about right).   Fill sawdust bin (every 3 weeks or so).   Obtain sawdust (as needed).   Empty compost onto garden (once per year). 

Report Card.   A / B+   (See blog post for details).

Biggest Challenge.  Big parties.  We rented a portable toilet for our Grand Opening Celebration to service 120. 

Biggest success factor.  Courage.  The composting toilet system is, by far, our most controversial alternative system.   The other systems ask little of a visitor.  Everyone gets used to it.  Eventually they may even appreciate the only toilet that never plugs, never leaks, is much less odiferous than a two year old’s diaper, keeps pharmaceuticals out of our lakes and streams, and feeds raspberries.

The Connection.    How better to “see” the cycle of life, death and life-renewed?  From food to you to food again.    

The Bee-Attitudes

Off the prairie's spine, the four of us just stood there, staring at the symptom.    Our terrible conclusion---the unthinkable cause---so obvious and unanimous.  There could be only one explanation.  I couldn't tell if Anne’s pained expression was sadness or anger.    And now as I write, I still feel that pain.   Then my head begins peeling away the layers, searching for the cause beneath the cause.  “Don’t go down there!"  But like the blonde confronting the haunted basement door, I can’t help myself.    Like watching the blonde, I've a pretty good notion of what horror I’ll find:  my role in this catastrophe.    There’s really only two mysteries.  Will I dare actually look?  And, if I do, what happens next?   But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

Who besides myself just stood there staring?  My sweetie Linda and our guests Carole and Anne.  After Carole and Anne heard us speak at Midwest Mountaineering, Carole (the blog’s shy yet determined woman) asked to visit Home the Land Built.  “Yes, please and always yes!”  Now, after their visit, after our bonding experiences, I’d like to count them among my friends.

What were we staring at?

This is white wild indigo. 

What’s wrong with this picture?  If you shout, “I know”, then you’re way ahead of where I was two years ago.  If not, I invite you to take another creaking step down the stairs. 

What did the four of us notice?   Only one seed pod on the entire plant.   And as we gazed about, each plant held but a few pods.   In bloom, our prairie’s white wild indigo, in their thousands upon thousands, look breathtakingly like this.   

   

The flowers then form seeds pods---one for each flower, dozens on each plant---which rattle in the winter winds.

What was our terrible conclusion, the unthinkable cause of the missing seed pods?   There could be only one cause.  Lack of pollinators.    Lack of foraging bees. 

Now comes the lonely part of writing.  I wish I was at your side.  I wish I could perceive your feelings as you contemplate “lack of foraging bees?”   I’m wondering if you feel like Anne, Linda, Carole and myself? 

I know how my dear sustainable veggie farmer neighbor Sandy Dietz felt a week ago.  “…more than a little scary,” she confessed in her Whitewater Gardens newsletter.  “…the lack of bees that we have this year.  I really noticed it when I was picking zucchini the other day, and was finding that most the baby fruit was shriveling up and dying.  Not getting pollinated by the way it looked.  That’s when I noticed that there were absolutely no bees around.  Zucchini flowers wide open and not a single buzz.  Very strange.”   Having just walked the 300 foot zucchini row I confirm.  Many pollen-hungry flowers.  Not the buzz of a single bee.

My next step isn’t scary at all:  list the possible causes for the crashing bees.  Loss of habitat.  Pesticides.  Human-engineered disease.  Our historically cold and wet spring (global warming?).    Blah.  Blah.  Blah.    I don’t’ mean blah, blah, blah who cares?  I mean blah, blah, blah we've heard things like this before AND we know nothing will really change.   And nothing will change because this list isn't viscerally scary.  Because suddenly I’m not descending the stairway to my own culpability.  Instead I switched channels  to some kind of public television documentary.    I switched channels…

Suddenly I tumble to the bottom of the stairs.   Choking on the dust, I lift my head, tremble at what I see.  And when I shake off the horror, I want to beg forgiveness. 

I’m sorry.  I’m sorry for all the times I've said  I don’t want to know.   I’m sorry that even when I did want to know, I let public TV connect the dots for me.  I mistook being informed with seeing for myself.    I’m sorry I didn't really engage my right to look, not in the Michael Pollan sense.   And mostly I’m sorry I separated myself from the world.   I’m sorry I diminished myself.   I’m sorry that each time I turned my head away from the world, or turned the channel, I turned away from my life.   

What then is my lesson?  What of the seedless indigo?  The fruitless zucchini?  The crashing bees?    What bee-attitude needs composing?   I’m beginning to wonder if life isn't really a whole lot simpler than I ever imagined.  I’m beginning to wonder if the real problem is that I've accepted a myth about a world that is separate from me (and can by and large be ignored). 

What if my vitality---the wholeness of my life--- is inexplicably and inextricably linked to the wholeness of the world?    What if each time I looked at a white flower or a pollen-laden bee, I was really looking at my life?    What if the healing of the world and the healing of myself were one and the same?  Perhaps all I need do is fully live my life---I mean really encounter the world as it is.  See the bee.  Be the bee.  Then hang my head and cry.  Or drop my jaw in ecstatic awe. 

Then, perhaps, I will finally do all I can really do.  Perhaps help create a new world---wholly unlike our opaque grid-tied world---where I don't need an expert to connect the dots, where I can always see if my values are at play.  Can you imagine such a transparent world?   Actually I can.  Every day for the past nine years  I experienced the wonder of such a world as I wrote The Corridor.

I've watched public TV (___ fill in your own favorite "news" here) my whole life, gaining awareness yet changing nothing.   Then, with one look at a single seed pod,  I devote 6 hours to writing this blog.    It’s the difference between reading about Haiti and going to Haiti.  And if Haiti is too far, then come on down to Home the Land Built.  Together we’ll snap off a single seed pod and rattle what remains as we descend the stairs into our own richer lives. 

My Bee-Attitudes will either get me jailed or ignite a cultural revolution or both.  If followed, nobody would buy anything in America.  Not until every American can shout out "I'm free to see!".

My Bee-Attitudes
1.  Say "I want to know it."
2.  Go see it for myself.
3.  If I can't see it, change my life so I can.

Note:  I know the above bears fruit for any valued relationship with "it", be "it" brother or bee.  Question is, what more can I gain by valuing more relationships?

Rah-dur!!!

Choose Hope

First came my next door neighbor of 15 years.  Inoperable Stage 3b lung cancer.   Then came one of my dearest friends.  Stage 3a ovarian cancer.  Then came my mother.   Surgery to remove a dead section of colon.  She woke to a bag.   With all this in the last 3 weeks, the weight of it sank me into my darkest, most lifeless self.   When Linda asked how I was doing---would I like to talk about it?--- I just shrugged and stared into…well…that’s the question isn’t it?  Where does the best of me go when hope fades?

No place good.  That I can tell you for sure.  At times, hopelessness is a regular buddy of mine, like the  empty stool next to me in a lonely bar.   And if following my beer’s sinking suds isn’t bad enough for me, what does it do for those I love,  for those I’ve lost hope for?

Less than nothing.   I recall my first phone conversation with my mom after her surgery.    I’m embarrassed to admit that part of me couldn’t wait to end the call.  Sure she sounded terrible.  Who wouldn’t?  But  looking back I wonder how much I contributed to her smoke-filled mood.  Did my hopeless attitude transfer over the phone line?  And if so, did any of her healing angels hide in the gloom?  And if I can’t pull my head out of my beer, what am going to say to my old neighbor?  My dear friend?  My dear friend’s troubled partner?

Nothing.  That’s why yesterday, for the first time ever, I made a seemingly simple decision. 

I decided to choose hope.

What a head-slapper that was:  to realize I could choose hope as surely as I could chose a better stool,  the one next to all my friends.   Long ago I learned that forgiveness is a choice---a choice I might have to remake every day---but a choice nonetheless.  So too I suddenly realized with hope.   

How silly of me to take so long to realize hope is a choice.  I mean, you’re reading the blog of one the biggest Lord of the Rings fans in the observable universe.  “There’s always hope,” says Aragorn.  And Tolkien was clear: not only is despair a sin of sorts, buts it’s also a simple mistake.  Since no one---not even the all-seeing me---knows for sure what is going to happen, then my iron-clad belief in the inevitable tragedy is just plain wrong.   As such, there always is hope.

Who can say what inspired me?  No doubt my daily walks on the ever-emerging prairie touched my heart.  Perhaps my turning point came a few months back, when I tried to write the author blurb for the back cover of my novel.   Struggling to summarize, I finally wondered what drove me to devote 9 years to this endeavor anyway.    What is it I believed so strongly?   After writing and scratching out dozens of entries, I finally penned the following.  “Michael Larsen believes that a MUCH better world is coming.”  And if that weren’t enough I surprised myself by adding one more word:  “SOON”. 

Hmmm…I thought, I guess I am a person of some hope.  Inexplicably wild hope!  Coming out of my closet of despair, I typed those words of hope for all the world to see.  Or at least all the world that reads the author blurb of my novel.

Glowing in the light of my newfound hope, I called my mom yesterday.  For 15 minutes, we talked like normal human beings.   Even laughing.  And what could be more healing---for both of us---than a good, heartfelt laugh?

I’m looking forward to talking to my dear friend’s troubled partner.  To sharing the light, the light when all other lights go out.  The Light of Hope.   

And the first sparks of hope are no more than a decision away.

Rah-dur!

The Secret Weapon

 

The sheer magnitude of our victory overwhelms.  Our victory, in this case, is over the wildparsnip, that once dominant invasive capable of inflicting a week’s long painful rash.  And the medal for our success can be hung upon one amazingly effective tool.  And thinking back, the same tool has an unbeatable track record of success.

Its not really fair to say I discovered the tool.  I mean, it was right there, just waiting to be picked up and used.   And I certainly knew about it.  Everyone did.  And strangely, I think everyone including myself, knew it would work.   Not only did we know it would work, but it would be by far the least expensive solution.   But the cultural taboo against this tool is so strong, that folk wrinkle their nose in disgust at its mere mention.

And I’m not talking about humanure or composting toilets or drinking rainwater or any those unusual, yet societally skeptical tools, we’ve deployed.  I’m talking about a tool that everyone, myself included, is offered ever day.  In all fairness to the skeptics, I must say this tool has a big drawback:  this tool takes time.

In fact, the tool IS time.

To defeat the parsnip---or I should say to reduce it from a rolling sea of yellow to a few golden flashes upon the green---took seven years.   But truly the deed is done.  Last night, as Linda and I walked the well-mowed prairie perimeter, we laughed in disbelief at our success.  “There’s one.  And oh look, another one over there.”  While I’d still be whacking my way across the prairie with a machete in each hand, I’d never be surrounded.   And this morning, that’s exactly what I did.  I’d whack one down.  Walk.  Whack another.  And that was in a “bad” spot.  The parsnip will never be eliminated.  They’ll constantly fling their seeds into the prairie from the surrounding fields.   We’ve knocked it way down the invasive species list, never to return to the top.  And all thanks to time.

For seven years we’ve cut them down after flowering and before setting seed.  The John Deere took the thick accessible patches.  The machete took the rest.  And what seeds did manage to germinate found themselves competing against prairie plants, whose great roots penetrate down 10 feet, deeper than the tallest parsnip rises.   Only on the edge, where the prairie plants are thin, do the parsnip get a toe hold and there the John Deere will find them as Linda makes her rounds.

And time, the same heroic tool that so dominated the parsnip, also turned a pasture into a prairie.   Sure, we could have sprayed the pasture with Roundup three times, then planted the prairie seeds.  But instead, we just drilled the prairie seed right into the pasture sod.   They say our prairie might have taken a year or two longer to emerge.  We'll never know for sure.   What we do know is its now incredibly diverse, breathtakingly beautiful and rated “Excellent” by the Winona County Soil and Water Conservation District.    All thanks to time.

I marvel now---when my remaining time on this world is surely less than it once was--- that I learned the value of time as tool.   Before, though I never had enough time in the day to get everything done, I seemed to have even less time for results.  And I guess that’s really the problem:   how long am I willing to wait for results?  How long until a prairie emerges?  How long until parsnip is well-managed?    How long until my novel is written?  How long until Linda and I feel “fully at home” here on the Land? 

You know, when I think back to all the really good things in my life---my lasting friendships, my journey to the Home the Land Built, the endless dance that is my partnership with Linda---all required the same tool.  Time.  

 

So now when I feel it’s taking a long time to get make my book a publishing success.  Or  the next time I give “the tour” of our house, and someone says, as they always do, “that’s really cool all but it all just takes too much time”.   I imagine I’ll just sigh and say, “Yes.  Thank you creator.  Yes.”

A Walk with Hope

Mom just went into the hospital.  Old neighbor just discovered inoperable cancer.  On Monday, a dear friend will discover if she too has cancer.  My heartfelt prayers for all.  What else?  Where do I go to find my source of hope?  Of light and life?

To the prairie.  Better still, to walk the prairie with a friend.  So I invite you, now, to walk with us.  May you find what you seek.  And if not in pictures, then please, come, walk the prairie with us.

Rah-dur!

The Silence of the Land

As the year’s first warmth and sunshine arrived, Linda and I rushed out with the bumblebees and monarchs.   Unlike these flower feeders, we planted future flowers around Home the Land Built:  49 trees and shrubs, 150 perennials, 8 pots of annuals, 7 tomatoes, a kitchen garden’s worth of herbs.  And as I dug, or especially when I paused, wiping away dirt and sweat, I felt myself in conversation with The Land.  Not that I was actually talking.  I’m not that crazy yet, but I’m working on it.  Still, all things have their way of communicating, if only I can listen.

The Land had a story to tell.  But it was hard to hear.  Hard because it was buried beneath the grass and the green, and the riot of possibility.  Hard because I could feel---in spite of acres of newly emerging prairie---the Land’s pain.

 

Strange how such a tale could emerge from the ground, from digging in the dirt.  A narrow wild hedgerow separates our 2 acre homesite from the plowed and planted state land to the north.   While the vast majority of our new plantings were well south of the hedgerow, we planted four spectacular native trees---river birch, bladdernut, witch hazel, shagbark hickory---into or just south of the hedgerow.   And as soon as my shovel slit the hedgerow sod, the Land began to speak.

Until these four trees, all I’d ever hit was a heavy, reddish soil.  Not quite clay, but close.   Technically, according the US Geological Survey, it’s called a silt-clay-loam.  Except of course when we dug near the house, where the soil had been backfilled from excavation.  Then, as one might expect, the soil would technically be called compacted crap.    But the hedgerow was another thing entirely.

The hedgerow soil was stardust.  So light.  So black.  So full of life.    Unlike the others, we felt no need to amend it with compost (yes, this is the first humanure compost adventure folks, that’s me out there on the tree).  What a thrill!  What an abundance! 

What a sadness!

The Land’s pained story was there for me to hear.  As it always had been.  I wonder how often I’ve mistaken not listening for silence?

The story of the Land soil goes something like this.  Long, long ago, before the European settlers arrived, all the soil of the Land was light and life-filled.   The music of the soil creatures---ambitious ant, leaping springtail, lumbering waterbear---was there for all to hear, their song of life and death and life renewed.  And this soil, unique only to this little corner of the state and the nearby driftless region, was a gift of the last glacier.  Having oozed around, not over the Land, great winds blew dust off the glacier, only to settle on what is now the so called silt-clay-loam subsoil, creating the most fertile soil imaginable.  Loess, the soil scientists called it. 

They should have called it lost.  For that is soon what happened.  Moldboard plows ripped the prairie sod.  The cream gentians screamed.  But who listened?  Wheat was planted.  The mycorrhizal fungi, that great connecting web infusing nearly all non-agricultural life, said I don’t know you.  But who listened?  June downpours ripped the Land into gullies.  The light soil washed away, became a mud-slide, burying the town of Beaver 39 times in one year.  But who was listening?  Soon the topsoil was gone and all that remained, all the remains on the Land, is the near lifeless subsoil.

Except for the one place the plow never touched:  the hedgerow.  No wonder I walk up into the hedgerow, always a foot or two.  There lies the last remnant of the glacial winds.  The last remnant of the light and life that once lived here.  Ten thousand years of prairie soil building will not replace the gift of the glaciers.  It’s gone.  Forever.  Or at least until the next glacier detours around us.

Until then, I will do what I can.  And the best I can lend is my ear.  Listen.  No more will I enable the silence of the Land.  

Published

I thought I knew how I was going to feel.   Why wouldn’t I?  I’d imagined this day ever since the journey began, and that’s nine years ago.  This was no personal, never-to-publish, cathartic work.  I’d just finished one of those.  In June 2004, when I took the first timid steps into The Corridor, I dreamed that one day others---you even---might read the story.  And then, best of all, maybe you and your friends and I could chat about it.  People person that I am, that’s what I was most looking forward to.  Intimate gatherings.  I imagined (almost) nothing would feel better.

But today, when Amazon first posted my Kindle book,

Kindle

followed soon after by the paperback,

Paperback

I felt…well…I didn’t really feel anything.  I’m trying, digging down for those feelings that must be there.  But I have yet to unearth them. 

Maybe I’m scared, I told myself.  Maybe readers will freak out.  Here I am, naked before the world.  The Corridor fleshed out a part of me that I let few see.  Or maybe no one will read it.  Or worse yet, readers won’t react.  Perhaps I’ll have no long-anticipated conversations.   

Nah!  That’s not it.  I’m not scared.  I’m the gold medal winner in fear recognition. 

Maybe I’m overwhelmed.  Too much, too fast.  I mean it was just today that Amazon said, “how about publishing a Kindle version”.  So I rebuilt all the Corridor maps, and the formatting, uploaded, set a $0.99 tantalizing price and pressed the publish button.   And then, I get this text from Linda saying my book’s on Amazon and I think she means Kindle but when I check---wading through a backwash of books with Corridor in the title---its Kindle AND the $14.24 paperback.  Yes, I’m stunned. 

But I’m not overwhelmed. 

Believe it or not I think I’m sad.  It makes no sense whatsoever—I feel so relieved to be done with writing and re-writing all seven versions and editing and copyediting and proofing and self-publishing---but truth is I feel grief.  It’s over.   By far the biggest project in my life and it’s over.    At least this part of it.    So I guess that’s OK.  Whether it makes sense or not, I can let myself grieve.  Out on the prairie maybe, with the breathtaking lupine.   Probably not with a smoking hot chainsaw.

My mom called today to tell me how much she liked the book (she qualified for the Mother’s Day galley copy) and said I should keep writing.  As appreciative as I was, I could feel her disappointment when I responded with a sigh.   “If people really like it, I’ll write another.  Some day.”  I told her.  “Right now, I want to reap the harvest.” 

So yes, read the book if you're drawn to it.  And then---please, please, please---invite me to a conversation.  With your book club.  Your church.  Your beer buddies.  Your school.  I could spend hours with just you and a cup of tea.   Don’t let distance daunt you.    I love Santa Rosa.  Galway.  Even Wisconsin.  And there’s always Skype. 

Thinking about a conversation with you, now that starts to get me excited. 

P.S.   If nothing else, you’ll finally figure out what Rah-dur means when you read it.