The quality of the food going in at the top determines the quality of turd emitting at the bottom. I have good credentials. Born in the 40s I grew up in the 50s and our food was sparse, simple and wholesome.
Fresh vegetables in season came from our garden and the hinterland. Bread was home-made or came from a bakery in the next village. We got fish from the quay, straight off the boats or brought to us.
We collected shellfish from the shore.
There was no processed food and no food miles. Our chicken dinners came from the hen-run at the top of the garden but only when the hens laid no more eggs and our meat came from the village butcher.
Growing up in '50s Ireland without running water, all the family were adept at disposal of human excrement. We knew what an Elsan toilet was and how to manage it.
I mention this because of a matter all the rage on boater media:
waterless closets where the idea is to avoid composting but use materials which allow the contents to be kept as dry as possible with a view to using the produce as a fuel rather that a compost.
Or something?
The movement, (pun slipping through?) uses a completely different methodology to mine. Urine is separated at source from solids and the solids are mixed or coated with various mediums: sawdust , cat litter, (absorbent clay), shredded paper, pine needles. I confess to knowing nothing about this movement (there goes that pun again) other than that it exists on canal boats. Their final objective is to bin it.
All use cheaper shoddier versions of my AirHead to separate the liquid from the solid. Some 'commercial', some bespoke, some [home made] contraptions exhibiting an ingenuity which stretches incredulity to new limits. Others use chemistry, physics and biology to produce a finished product which is used to advance their concept of recycling to a higher plane. No-one in this coterie produces compost from their own excrement to produce enriched soil to grow food which they then eat.
I cannot go along with this. In my world, and it is a very real world, nature recycles.
Soil produces food. Food is processed in the body fuelling muscles and building up tissue and bone. The waste is returned to the earth from where the cycle repeats. These jokers return nothing to the earth.
They mix their excrement with cat litter or sawdust and bin it. Or burn it on their fire.
Fresh vegetables in season came from our garden and the hinterland. Bread was home-made or came from a bakery in the next village. We got fish from the quay, straight off the boats or brought to us.
We collected shellfish from the shore.
There was no processed food and no food miles. Our chicken dinners came from the hen-run at the top of the garden but only when the hens laid no more eggs and our meat came from the village butcher.
Growing up in '50s Ireland without running water, all the family were adept at disposal of human excrement. We knew what an Elsan toilet was and how to manage it.
I mention this because of a matter all the rage on boater media:
waterless closets where the idea is to avoid composting but use materials which allow the contents to be kept as dry as possible with a view to using the produce as a fuel rather that a compost.
Or something?
The movement, (pun slipping through?) uses a completely different methodology to mine. Urine is separated at source from solids and the solids are mixed or coated with various mediums: sawdust , cat litter, (absorbent clay), shredded paper, pine needles. I confess to knowing nothing about this movement (there goes that pun again) other than that it exists on canal boats. Their final objective is to bin it.
All use cheaper shoddier versions of my AirHead to separate the liquid from the solid. Some 'commercial', some bespoke, some [home made] contraptions exhibiting an ingenuity which stretches incredulity to new limits. Others use chemistry, physics and biology to produce a finished product which is used to advance their concept of recycling to a higher plane. No-one in this coterie produces compost from their own excrement to produce enriched soil to grow food which they then eat.
I cannot go along with this. In my world, and it is a very real world, nature recycles.
Soil produces food. Food is processed in the body fuelling muscles and building up tissue and bone. The waste is returned to the earth from where the cycle repeats. These jokers return nothing to the earth.
They mix their excrement with cat litter or sawdust and bin it. Or burn it on their fire.
KEEP IT WARM
KEEP IT MOIST
OXYGENATE IT
TURN IT OVER
KEEP IT MOIST
OXYGENATE IT
TURN IT OVER
