a 5 gallon bucket is a (wo)man's best friend!

This week we finally completed our humanure toilet.  You can get an idea of what we built by looking at this design. We modified the design a bit, adding a 2nd chamber for sawdust storage and possibly a separate container for diverting urine in the future.  Here are a few pictures:

For all intents and purposes, it looks and feels just like a normal toilet.  We've been using it for a few days now and so far I have no complaints.  Instead of flushing gallons of water down the drain every day, we just use a scoop of non-kiln dried sawdust from un-pressure treated trees (collected from a local sawmill for $2.00/trash can) as an organic cover material to control any odor.  Then, when the bucket is mostly full, we dump the entire contents onto the compost pile. 


In preparation for the first full bucket, we dug out the base of the first bin in our 3-bin compost site and put down about of foot or so of straw and leaf mulch (collected last fall).  There, the worms and bacteria and other organisms do their work--over time turning our humanure into viable compost.  Of course there's a little more too it than that, and you want to be careful to follow all the steps carefully when it comes to creating and properly aging your compost.  But those are the basics.  If you're interested in learning more, read The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. You can down the entire book for free in PDF form here: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/

While at the sawmill we were also able to sort through a pile of scrap wood to scavenge for bee hive building materials.  Hopefully we can piece together our top-bar hive from these scraps and end cuts of boards that we diverted from the landfill and got absolutely for free. If you need something, always go straight to the source. When you cut out the middle-man (in this case, Home Depot or Lowes), you never know what you could get for next to nothing--or nothing at all! 


In the garden we took a few risks.  Last weekend, when the weather was warm we decided to plant a few cool weather crops in a permanent raised bed in the front of the house.  Sadrah's parents established these beds several years ago, so the soil is great and was already loose, fertile and ready for planting.  We added a bag of compost left over from last year to the soil and mostly planted seeds leftover from the fall planting in the cold frames.  We planted Rhubarb Chard, Mustard Greens, Winter Radish, Endive Escarole, Buttercos Romaine, Bloomsdale Spinach, Napoli Carrots, and Purple Top Turnips.  We were probably a little over anxious here, since last night the temperatures dropped down around the freezing mark and a few snow flakes drifted through the air.  The weather can be very unpredictable in our climate this time of year, but we gave it a shot hoping to get a jump on the season.  We covered the bed with a small, plastic-vented hoop house to give it a little more protection, and then added a layer of reemay (row cover) yesterday.  This is how we learn, and I'm glad to report that so far the turnips have sprouted.  Hopefully we'll see other little sprouts coming up soon.

Everything that survived the winter in the cold frames is doing well.  We've been picking a bit of mache and some other greens 1-2 times a week for wonderful salads. Today we cultivated the top layer of soil where we could and thinned our 2 rows of kale.  Thinning is a tough task--it's like killing off one of your children so the others will grow big and strong.  But it must be done or they'll all just smother each other and nothing will grow. Meanwhile, our garlic planting from last fall is showing amazing growth since we pulled back the straw mulch about 2 weeks ago.  We also covered that bed with some reemay just too give it a little protection against the cold and wind for the next few nights.  You can see the garlic plants below.



We've decided to have the main garden tilled again, so hopefully our friend down the road will be up with his little Kubota tractor in the next few days, weather permitting.  This will help dry out and loosen the soil so we can start building our raised beds and finally get to planting.  Our onion sets and potato tubers have finally arrived, so we're getting very excited to start getting things into the ground!

On our way back from the sawmill this week we happened upon a great little place called Harvest Home Organics in the Owasco Valley. Rose and her husband Doug have a beautiful 8-acre organic farm out there that we hope to visit again and learn more from all their years of experience.  We only had a few minutes to chat before rushing off to work, but I already have more questions about wind energy (they have a small windmill in their backyard) and planting schedules.  If you live in our area, definitely check them out at the Skaneateles Farmers Market this summer.