Gotta Get This Garden Started

I started my garden, I am fully using the The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book methods, namely using a thick thick layer of hay for mulch, I purchased 4 bales of coastal hay, I didn't till my garden this year, I barely cleaned it up from last year's garden, I just knocked down the big stuff, I did rake out the seed heads from the carrots, I didn't want to save them because I found at least one wild carrot growing in the middle and they can cross pollinate and the seeds will make something other than the original carrots. Other than that, I didn't rake or till, I merely separated the bales and placed the fluffy hay all over my garden. The only place I didn't put the hay was the rock walkway.

I purchased 12 cherry tomato plants (I didn't mean to buy 12, I thought I only picked up 8, my mistake), I also purchased 8 anaheim pepper plants. I figured out where I wanted the plants, I hollowed out places for the plants in the hay, I dug up a bit of dirt and planted each plant, then I tucked the hay around the plants. Next I watered them in, I also watered in the rest of the hay to settle it and add some moisture to the soil.


Here are some pictures of the garden just before I worked it, after I laid down the hay (Thanks LL for helping me with the last bale!) and planted the plants.

This is the garden before the little bit of cleaning I did do. These 3 pictures, you can see the bean pods from last year, I just left them, if they sprout I'll be happy, if they don't, I'm not worried about it. Sorry about these pix being dark, it was getting dark before I stopped, I snapped a few pix before going in for the night.

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This is the 4 bales of hay, pre-spread.

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Here is Pekoe, wishing I would stop working and come in the sky castle for the night.

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Here is the garden, post-spread. I used all 4 bales, honestly 3 would have worked, but I went ahead and used the 4th bale.

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This cute little plant is one pepper plant, I planted 8 of them.

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These are the tomatoes.

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I'm watering the garden here, I took care of the plants then I watered the rest of the garden/hay to settle in the hay and add some moisture to the soil to make it easier to plant later.

Here is a quick video I took of Pekoe running in the hay, she loves doing that






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Humanure

Sit, flush and forget, that's what most of us do, multiple times a day. We use perfectly good, drinkable, potable water to flush our waste, what a waste it truly is. After we flush, we don't think about all the water that is used and wasted to process the sewage that is created, chemicals are pumped into our water system, the water we DRINK, so that we can do it all over again. I'm starting to sound pretty green aren't I?

Honestly that's not the reason why I stopped using a flush toilet system. For us, it was a case of necessity. We were moving completely off grid, building a cabin, there is little water, at least little water to waste on flushing a toilet. We had no well, no septic system, no flush toilets. We needed a good way to deal with our toilet waste so I started researching how to eliminate our eliminations.

That’s when I found Joseph Jenkins and Humanure. Well, first I learned about composting toilets. These are usually all self contained units, looking like uber toilets, they tend to come with an uber price tag too.

How they work is they contain your waste within the unit, you add cover material, usually sawdust or something like that. Many of them have heaters,  vents and fans to help dry out the waste. After a period of time, you empty the container and finish composting outside if need be. The biggest problem with these is the price tag, usually thousands of dollars, plus these tend to be rather large, bulky units.


It turns out that Joseph Jenkins figured out a very simple way of composting bodily waste using little more than a 5 gallon bucket, a toilet seat and lid and some organic cover material. You split the composting  into two parts, with the majority of it going on outside in a compost pile instead of inside the unit. The system is so simple, nearly fool proof, I quickly decided it was the right way to go for us, or perhaps more accurately, it was the best way for us to go.

This is also a common question I get about living off grid, how and where do I go to the bathroom? It's quite simple once you know about composting and sawdust toilets. We have been using this system since Dec 2007, we have tweaked the system a couple of times, other than that it has worked like a charm for us.  The main thing we have changed is the outside portion. We started out using a wire enclosure to hold the compost pile, we are not on level ground and once the compost pile was as tall as I am, the whole thing began to tilt, we were afraid it would topple over and we did not want to have to deal with that kind of mess.

Bob created a 2 barrel system to hold and compost our humanure.  This system composts fast, there is little to no smell, the only time it has any odor is when we are dumping the bucket into the first barrel. Once the door is closed, no more smell. The bottom composter has no smell, well I take that back, it does have a pleasant, humus, dirt smell, nothing like what originally went in.
Here is a video about that:




Joseph Jenkins has been kind enough to shoot videos of his system and place them on YouTube, you can view them here, there are 14 videos, they will play one after the next:



You can read and download (free)  Joseph Jenkins Humanure book here:
http://humanurehandbook.com/index.html
This contains everything you ever wanted to know about sawdust toilets, including instructions how to build one yourself. You don't need to live off grid like I do to use a sawdust toilet, many people have and use sawdust toilets along side their flush toilets. I read about one lady who had a flush toilet and a sawdust toilet in her bathroom. She placed instructions on the door, stating that you could either use the pure drinking water wasting toilet, or you could use the Earth friendly, no water wasting sawdust toilet. She said that most people opted to use the sawdust toilet.



All written text and audio podcasts from this blog are copyrighted and owned by Wretha unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved, You may download or copy for your own personal enjoyment, but please do not distribute (text or audio) without written permission.


Wretha,
properly pronounced wreetha, (included for the text reader).


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