Natural Building Blogs by Sarah Partridge

Building Community Crafts Environment Heritage Natural Restoration Rural Skills Suffolk Vernacular


 
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Humanure
Keep solids and liquids seperate for maximising your harvest!

humanure
Label and mature humanure for three years before use, then use indirectly to feed your trees.

Sawdust
Sawdust donated by local joinery who have an abundance of it!

Wheel-chair friendly compost toilet

The Earth Closet at Orchard Barn






 

Contributions welcome - 23rd July 2018

I’m talking toilets again. Water free compost toilets to be precise. At the risk of becoming anal about the subject there’s a lot I want to say.

Waste not - want not

Minor health warning – do not read further if you are offended by human waste….

Building regulations ...

As Centre Manager, I take great delight in conducting the Toilet Tour at Orchard Barn. We have constructed what is probably the only off-grid, water-free, wheel-chair friendly, compost toilet in Suffolk that is officially signed off by Building Regs.

Make it yourself

Inside our wattle and daub earth closet you will find two buckets - complete with seats etc.  One is for ‘solids’ and the other is for ‘liquids’. I’m being a little delicate here but you get the gist. Pee in one, and poo in the other. It’s environmental education of the most basic kind.

Just like continental loos, there’s a pedal bin for used tissues. And in true Orchard Barn style there’s a bucketful of sawdust that makes an excellent soak and de-odorizer.

I was going to tell you about the ‘manual’ approach to bucket emptying, but since I am a female toilet fairy I need to tell you about the ‘wo-manual’ nature instead.

Urine as a compost activator

We are big on compost, and compost benefits from an activator. Urine is the best activator. So, approximately once a week I trundle down the orchard with the bucket of pee and deposit it on the current compost heap.

Humanure

Solids are matured in the bucket for 3 years before being fed to the fruit trees! We harvest a 5 gallon bucket of humanure per year.

What more can I say?

Come and visit. Spend a penny in our loo.

Know that your contributions are welcome and well used!


Compost corner at Orchard Barn