Humanure I

HUMANURE. Yes, human manure …… I was a little freaked out about it at first; after all, isn’t human feces not only yucky, but, well, dangerous?!? According to Joseph Jenkins (www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html) the answer is NO… and the science supports him. Common sense, too: if it came out of a healthy body, can it be pathological? Depends on what you do with it… any manure, left on top of the soil, can grow stuff if it stays wet enough and definitely attracts flies. COMPOSTED manure is safe- and makes beautiful, rich compost in pretty short order. After all, many of us have used cow or chicken manure, nicely packaged
and not too expensive in $ terms, to enrich our gardens. Surely commercial manure from commercial animals comes with all the commercial additives used to raise them…. So what’s wrong with our own shit? If we’re healthy in the first place, nothing. After all, if there was a pathological essence in our own shit, very few of us would be here now, since most of our ancestors didn’t have indoor plumbing as we know and use it today.
Here’s what I do:
This elegant, comfy Victorian commode chair sits in an old armoire. It’s frankly the most comfortable toilet I’ve ever used: tall enough to suit me, sanitary, discreet (when the door’s closed) and ODOR FREE, as long as the deposits are covered with clean material- I’ve used straw, sawdust, or cocoa hulls…. And no one, however fecophobic, has been able to find it by smell alone! When the bucket underneath is full, the whole shebang goes into the compost, is covered with straw, and rots merrily away in short thermophilic order. It gets HOT.

Here' a picture of some finished humanure compost: fragrant- smells like fresh, fine soil- because that's what it is!