Composting Potty - 3 Year Update

I checked the blog, and was surprised to find that it's been nearly three years since we started using our home made composting potty system.  Three years!  We've made some small tweaks to our system, but we are still using the potty that Brandon made and we haven't any concrete plans for an upgrade any time soon.  It must be working!  

When we were still weekend house renovation warriors, and I would spend time on the interweb reading about other peoples composting toilet systems, I always appreciated it when folks would give an update after using their alternative toilet system for a while.  In the photo above you can see our little plywood potty tucked to one side of the bathroom.  On the floor to the left of the potty is a plastic tub with fine pine shavings that we buy from Tractor Supply.  On the wall above, near the ceiling, is a regular vent fan made for bathrooms, which has a speed controller mounted near the light switch.  The vent fan helps keep the air in the room refreshed when needed.  A friend who visited for the first time told me after she used our potty, "it doesn't smell bad like I thought it would."  

In this photo you can see that inside the painted plywood box, is a five gallon plastic bucket.  This one is orange.  Different stores sell different colors, and every once in while, usually before a holiday or party, I buy a new bucket.  We now use a two bucket system.  Every time the bucket is emptied and rinsed, we set it outside in the sun, and put the other bucket, which has been outside, back in the potty.  This way we always have a fresh air dried, sun sanitized, bucket ready for use.  

We have found that after putting the clean bucket in place, it's best to put a big scoop of wood chips in the bottom of the bucket before it gets used.  This makes it easier to clean as it prevents toilet paper from sticking to the bottom of the bucket.  The pine shavings smell nice, and if each... ah... deposit, is adequately covered with wood chips, I haven't found smell to be a problem.  I keep a little brush handy for sweeping away stray wood chips from the lid and seat.  

Wood chips do get spilled to the floor and tracked around, but overall, cleaning this potty is easier than cleaning a flush toilet.  It's much easier to wipe down a straight sided box that always stays dry.  When we had a flush toilet at our last house, the outside of the bowl was often damp from condensation, which helped cat hair and lint stick to it and it was awkward to wipe off.  I had to twist my body into an uncomfortable position to clean behind the toilet and around the pipes and things that came up from the floor.  With this potty, I can move the plywood box out of the way and give the floor a good cleaning.  It's light enough that I can pick it up and move it wherever I want.  

"What's the status of the bucket?" That's a question we ask each other.  Every day, or every other day, or more than once a day, if we have house guests, the bucket needs to be emptied. We are lucky that our bathroom has a door to the outside, so we never have to carry the bucket through the house.   

To empty the bucket, we just raise the lid of the potty, grab the bucket by the handle, and carry it out the door.  Once it's empty, we rinse it off with either the garden hose or the shower head that has a hose.  If we use the shower hose, we dump the dirty water that collects in the bucket outside, so the shower stall never gets dirty.  Rarely does the bucket need to be wiped, as the water pressure takes care of most dirt, especially the hot water from the shower hose when on the setting where the water is concentrated into a single stream.  

In this photo you can see the distance we have to carry the bucket to the compost bins, which are under the biggest tree, past the greenhouse and garden. 

It's a wide grassy path to walk, and we sometimes do it after dark using headlamps. 

See that tall ragweed growing on the left of the photo above?  That's where the compost bins live.  They are far from the house, and screened by the tall weeds and a small fence. 

This is what you see when you walk behind the weed screen - seven large compost bins, with lids, that are open to the soil on the bottom.  During the spring and early part of the summer, when I had the garden hose handy, I would flip off all the lids (and frighten the black rat snake that likes to coil in one of the bins!), and water the contents.  I do this to make sure they have the moisture they need to decompose.  This fall, we will select the bins that have been inactive (no fresh buckets added) for over a year, and spread the contents on the hay field.  We did this last fall and the material was so decomposed there were no bits of identifiable material.  The oldest bins had decomposed so that nearly half of the bin was empty, and it was full when we stopped using it.   

I was going to end this post with a poop joke, but I couldn't think of one that wasn't crappy.  Ha!

Home with the Goats

It's so nice to be home.  The bat work this summer hasn't been too bad, really, but after a few weeks away from home it's taken me a couple of days to settle back into home life.  It feels so luxurious to have the morning and evening hours to follow my whims. Of course, my whims revolve around housework and farm chores - but that's the way I like it!   

As I was hanging laundry on the line and observing the lush green that surrounds me, I decided to let the girl goats out of their pasture to enjoy some fresh forage.  This means they immediately headed for my fruit trees to strip the branches bare.  Stop it!  

Next they went inside the corn crib barn to see if they could rob the feed bins.  In this picture, you can see how Peaches opens the cans.  She knows to use her forehead to push up on the lids.  If the lid doesn't open right away, she pushes and pushes until she dents the can or knocks it over.  Stop it! 

Before Peaches tried opening the feed cans herself, she jumped onto the milk stand, put her head in the lock, and cried for me to place the food in the bowl.  She is more than happy to be milked in exchange for sunflower seeds.  I let her explore the barn so little Noobi could get used to standing on the milk stand too.  I've been practicing with Noobi so she can be trained to be a milk goat.  I pet her and rub her all over, including under her belly, down her legs, and on her tiny udder.  She goes into the same trance that Peaches does when she is being touched and petted.  She stands completely still, barely breathing, with a distant look in her eyes.  I think she likes it.  

Once they gave up on getting to eat stuff from the cans, they sauntered out to browse the greenery near the barn where the chickens were scratching up the remains of their dinner. 

All this talk about goat breeding and the research I've been doing about line breeding has me looking at Noobi and Little Buck with a critical eye.  My goat experience is limited, but I think Noobi might be a pretty good looking goat.  Not just her pretty colors, but her body seems well proportioned and sturdy.  Her udder is small still, but it looks like it will be shaped like her mothers, which isn't too droopy. 

She has long elegant ears and a high narrow nose.  She also has horns.  Sigh. She wasn't supposed to have horns because at ten days old I took her to the vet, and had her horn buds cauterized, like the goat book said to do.  It was painful for her, so it is disappointing that it didn't work.  Not only did her horns grow in anyway, I think they might be a little oddly shaped from the botched horn job.  

The reasons people don't like horns on goats are practical ones.  She is more likely to get her head caught in a fence or a wire, and she is also more likely to poke me or one of the other goats with the spikes on her head.  When I squat down near her to pet her, those hard little horn spikes are right at eye level.  One jerky movement and she could poke me right in the face.  I also worry that they will grow at a strange angle, and start to poke into her head as they get longer and more curved.  Hopefully she will manage her horned life as well as her ancestors did.  I sort of like they way they give her a jaunty character.  

She has plenty of character.  While Peaches gives all her focus to eating, Noobi dances around and entices the dog to a game of chase.  She's shy with Brandon and stays just out of reach. 

She likes to climb walls and will sometimes leap sideways and put all four feet on a vertical surface as she springs away.  She runs at full gallop and stops with a funny nose snort.  

Monarch Caterpillars

Check out the monarch caterpillars that live on the milkweed by my back door.  They have such pretty stripes and long antenna.  You can see how this one has chewed the edge of the milkweed leaf. 

This one has nearly chewed it's leaf down to the mid vein.  They have antenna on both ends of their bodies, so it's hard to tell which end is the head and which is the tail. 

Every day I get nervous that the chickens are going to eat them.  The milkweed plants are heavy and have drooped over to the ground, so the caterpillars would be easy pickings for hungry birds.  I've read about how to raise them in captivity, which some folks say is good to do because most of the wild ones don't survive to adulthood.  I can't decide if I want to take on caterpillar care.  Maybe all the milkweed plants I have allowed to grow will help the wild ones survive.  

Goat Goals

Brandon asked me if I considered my goats to be pets or livestock.  He thought that by defining my relationship with my goats, it would help me with goat management decisions.  To breed or not to breed is the question. 

This is our gentle Noobi, who is nearly five months old now.  She's too young to be a mom yet, but it won't be long before both of my nubian goat does, Noobi and her mother, Peaches, could be bred so they can make more goats.   

If they make more goats, we could eat the goats, especially if they are boys, or sell the goats, especially if they are girls.  Of course, the process of making more goats also results in more opportunities for goat milk.  I haven't had time to harvest much milk so far, but I haven't given up on the idea either.  

I want to keep Little Buck, who is a gentle boy and has been tested and found negative for some common goat diseases, so he can make more beautiful babies with Peaches.  I've been reading about line-breeding with goats, and it's not uncommon to mate father to daughter, so I could let Little Buck and Noobi make a baby too, and see what we get.  Maybe we would get goat meat, which we do enjoy.  This was the essence of Brandon's question, I think.  Could I eat one of my goats?  I think I could. I think I could provide them an enjoyable goat life, and they could provide me with healthy food.  

If I didn't think I could eat the offspring of the goats I have now, I might discourage myself from allowing them to breed.  If my current herd are pets, then five pet goats is plenty! 

Bats, Snakes, Storms, and Flowers

It feels like it's been weeks since I was here, writing to you.  I have been traveling for work, spending night hours watching movies on tiny screens and swatting at mosquitoes while waiting for bats to fly into my nets.  I got to meet the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) above, but also several southeastern bats (Myotis austroriparius), like the one below.

Southeastern bats don't live throughout all of the areas that I work, so getting to catch some and get more familiar with this species was a nerdy treat for me.

While scouting for a good net site, I walked up to this tiny rough green snake (Opheodrys aestivus) on the ground on top of deep layer of golden pine needles.  At first glance it looked like a long, thin blade of grass.  The snake was calm and never tried to bite me when I picked it up for a photo shoot.

I returned home from a week in Tennessee to a weekend of impressive thunderstorms.  Someone was complaining that on our weekend off, it was going to be cool and raining, but I was not disappointed to stay close to home with the breeze and beautiful clouds.  I have a list of garden and farm chores that I was glad to ignore.  

The cucumbers and green beans are still making food, but the tomato plants have barely given me enough for salads.  There are green tomatoes on the vines, but they are not getting ripe and the plants look a bit wimpy.  The brussel sprout plants are riddled with holes and I haven't kept up my end of the battle against the caterpillars.  The greenhouse is an impenetrable jungle of tall weeds.  But the sunflower plants in the herb spiral are blooming!

One of the plants is so tall it reaches the second story of the house and has fourteen blooms!  

Bees visit the sunflowers and I counted three monarch butterfly caterpillars on the milkweed plants that grow there.  They are munching holes in the leaves but I'm glad to see them. 

Our fields are full of the frilly white blooms of queen Ann's lace.  It's time to cut the hay again but we are wary of the weather.  Of the three big big racks of hay that Brandon put up earlier this summer, at least one and half have gone moldy because the hay wasn't dry enough when it was stacked.  The moldy hay will make good mulch, but it still feels like wasted effort since the animals can't eat it.  This time we need several days of dry weather so we don't rush the drying time. 

A predator got my mamma chicken and her two remaining chicks.  She was so canny and hid her nest so well that I never found it.  She was the wildest chicken I've ever had, and taught her chicks to fear me and they wouldn't come close even for food.  I started to hope that she might actually raise them in the wild, but then they all disappeared.  Once again I learn the importance of being locked safely in the coop at night.