compost toilet | Crazy About Compost

Still Cookin’!

Pardon the ugly picture, but I couldn't resist. It's night time, but I couldn't wait until morning. On late Sunday afternoon, I went outside my house and found several bags of leaves at the curbside. I got really excited and stashed four massive bags in my backyard, in addition to the two that I shredded up and added to my compost pile. I was getting concerned about the compost pile, as it was starting to fall out of the Steady range around 80 degrees. Then I realized that it had been awhile since I added anything to it, so I contributed a hefty top layer of shredded leaves for insulation. I need to go looking for straw, too. In a little over 24 hours, just two bags' worth of shredded…

Compost Toilet Dust Suppression Tips

The only unexpected challenge I've encountered since I started using a compost toilet is making sawdust not dusty. Luckily I figured it out pretty quickly, and using a spray bottle is not the easiest way. I used to sit on the toilet, spraying down my sawdust supply in the bucket in front of me...too much effort! After spraying the sawdust seemingly forever, I'd still get to back to the dry, dusty mess after just a few scoops. Now, each week before I bring in my sawdust supply, I use my watering can to soak the bucket of sawdust first. Works like a charm! Simple change, major improvement.

Humanure Handbook review

If there was any book I'd recommend, even to someone that generally isn't interested in environmental issues, it's Humanure Handbook. I can confidently say this book is at the level of Silent Spring. How could a book about composting your bowel movements be important? Urine, feces and food scraps are super high in nitrogen. Leaves, cardboard, paper, straw, hay etc are all high in carbon. When you mix these two components together, in time you get beautiful, fertile compost that our earth desperately needs. What you don't get is chlorine and sodium hypochlorite (amongst other things used in water treatment process), and polluted air from burning off sewage sludge, or possibly worse having that sewage sludge spread on farmlands as a "soil amendment". Jenkins goes into great detail about the…