Ian Pringle

Update, I got the composting toilet setup last week and we've been using it since. The design will need to be reworked but I'm happy with what I made with a 2x4 and a third of a sheet of plywood. Now I'm thinking about the compost design a bit more. I'm leaning towards pallets since they're cheap/free, last 5 years or so, and are simple to put up. My wife suggested cinderblocks, but to get a 4x4x4 compost bin from cinderblocks is going to cost a bit of money and I'd like to avoid that. There's little waste/salvage material where we live so that's not something we could find for free.

I did have the thought of an IBC tote (300 gallon plastic tubs on pallet). That might be an ideal solution since it'd contain the humanure very  nicely with no spillage, could be moved very easily if needed with a 3pt carry-all, and would keep rodents/pests out a lot better. I would probably need to inoculate this with worms since they won't be able to tunnel up, but that's trivial. They're a little more expensive than pallets, but last indefinitely and are 1/4 the cost of the cinderblocks.

We have a 125 acre homestead in southern Missouri's Ozarks. Approximately 5 acres is pond, another 20ish is old and poorly maintained pasture (lots of not-grasses, only managed by cattle and horses), and than the remaining 100 acres is approximately 20 year old forest, the land had a very intensive harvest in the early 00s, which left mostly young trees and unmarketable trees behind. I've started working with the MO conservation department to get into a few programs for restoring the woods to health and restoring them to savanna -- which is what all of the Ozarks used to be prior to the late 1800s when the demand for wood to fuel the railroad stripped the land bare. We also have a few acres of glade spread out through the property -- including a very low producing pasture we call the "crap pasture".

My goals for the pasture land is to create seasonal pastures that have all-year forage for our herds (perhaps not the horses, they're snowflakes), and to create savanna that is hyper-productive. For pastures my vision is to select large shrubs and trees that are very hardy and tolerant of having roots stepped on as well as being grazed over. I'd like to plant these species on the edges of the pastures and then also in the middle of the pasture, essentially creating a "doughnut" of grasses between the trees. In the winter pasture(s) I might lean heavily onto non-grass forage, likewise with the late-summer pastures when we get our season drought time.

My goal for the wooded area is largely to restore it to savanna, which will help promote wildlife, particularly this will help the wild turkey populations which are in decline for a variety of reasons. A savanna is a wooded area that has a heavy herbaceous undergrowth and approximately 10 to 30 percent tree cover. Much of the Ozark savanna is traditional eastern pines, oaks, and hickory. I would like to select foods for this biome that are hardy enough to withstand deer, occasional grazing from goats/sheep/pigs, and are generally valuable for human consumption.

Honestly, for the glades, I just want to have some level of productivity. Glades are fairly rocky, often with exposed bedrock. Soil is pretty limited in these areas. Trees are generally stunted and there is little herbaceous growth. I'm sure I could just let some blackberries and dew berries run wild here, but I'd like to maintain some of the glade's natural charm if I can.

A bonus for plants in all these areas is if they are fire tolerant. We use fire very frequently out here for maintaining land, the native species are all very tolerant of and even dependent upon (like eastern pine) fire. It's a great means of controlling parasites as well and helping the herbaceous undergrowth to get a chance to grow through the leaf mould.

Any one doing something similar or have some resources on this sort of area? We have one or two acres right in the vicinity of our home where we plan to put up a more "normal" food forest, but these ones are a bit trickier for me to come up with good plantings for.

John C Daley wrote:Also if you want self selfciency, try Rainfall collection and use.
Its not as complicated or dangerous as those who dont understand will argue, my signature has a topic on the subject

Collecting rain water is on the todo, but would require we get gutters/fix gutters, so that's not as immediately doable as slapping some 2x4s and plywood together. I also own 5 acres of pond which has an average depth of ~6 feet, ~1 mile of creek, and more springs than I can count, so harvesting water is something we are already doing in a more passive sense. I am more surprised at how much water I pollute and then pump into a tank underground than anything. I want to get a grey water system going, but 1) also not as quick as building a poop-box and 2) we need to wean ourselves off the septic before I can really start on that since a healthy and properly run septic requires a high volume of water, but a grey water system often undoes this.

We got to experience 6 days without water this last week. Well stopped working Saturday morning and I got the system back online last night. It was a great eye-opening experience and we're glad to have been able to see a serious gap in our resiliency in a low stress situation where it wasn't the end of the world sort of thing. Anyway, we realized just how much water we use every day when I was carrying upwards of like 50 gallons into the house just to wash dishes/hands and flush toilets. We did a deep dive on composting toilets and decided right away to get a system setup. We live in the middle of no where with no government code, zoning, etc. whatsoever, and lots of land. We treat our homestead sort of like a giant sandbox/experiment and this was right up our alley.

I might ramble a bit here, I'm thinking through this process and wanted to get it 1) down and 2) in front of others.

I plan on getting the toilet built and setup tomorrow. I was reading the Humanure book and in a side panel it mentioned that for every 100lbs of humanity 0.4 cubic feet (or 3 gallons) of waste is produced every week (including the sawdust). All total we're probably somewhere between 350 and 400 lbs for the five of us, so that's approximately 12 gallons of waste per week on the top end, or 2.4 5-gallon buckets per week of waste generated. I figure that a 4x4x4 compost bin (constructed from pallets) would hold a little less 64 cubic feet of waste, let's call it 60 cubic feet to account for "padding/sponge" material on all six sides.

Every week we would generate approximately 1.6 cubic feet of waste (0.4 cubic feet * 4). It would then take approximately 37 weeks (60 cubic feet / 1.6 cubic feet per week) to create enough waste to fill a 4x4x4 compost bin. That bin would then need to cure for somewhere between 9 months and 2 years. I am very interested in putting in a minimal amount of input and minimizing routine chores. To me the optimum setup is to keep the waste in buckets until there is an entire bin's worth of waste -- but having 88 buckets is a bit impractical, so I'm setting myself up with 12 to start with -- or a month's worth of waste. Every month I'd dump approximately 6.4 cubic feet of waste into the bin and at the end of 9 months I'd have a bin which is ready to be set aside to cook for another 9 months to 2 years (currently unsure how long I'm comfortable letting it go, we don't currently have a food forest or much perennials at all, so I'd prefer to err on the side of caution and go longer).

That means a two bin system would be adequate if we are harvesting this compost on a 9 month schedule. However, a 9 month schedule means a few things:

1. Non-cyclical rotation, ie the end of a bin's cooking time rotates and isn't a fixed date
2. Need to ensure the compost stays hot
3. Winter will inevitably screw up the compost

I don't think I can eliminate #1 without giving bins uneven rotations -- or creating bigger bins. If the bin is custom built instead of just being prefabbed pallets we could make it a little bigger and create bins that can hold an entire year's worth of waste. Slightly over 5x4x4 would be enough to achieve this for my family. That would mean that we are able to dump a year's waste into one bin and then that bin could then cook for an entire year's time, resulting in a single date every year for harvesting one bin and shutting down another to cook off. Then it's merely a matter of having 1 bin more than the length of time you'd like to cook the compost for. If you cook it for one year you need two bins. If you cook it for two years, you need three bins, etc. Of course this isn't going to be static for families since families grow and shrink over time as kids are born, grow, and then leave.

I think what I will ultimately do, however, is go with the flow and use pallets aka 4x4x4 bins and each will sit for an approximate time no less than a year, but possibly more depending on season and convience. As luck would have it, a four bin pallet-based compost bin setup is a super easy setup. You build it in a 2x2 configuration and this results in a very stable construction. Four bins is enough to hold almost three full years of waste which gives plenty of time to be lazy and would even let bins go for as long as two full years of cooking before a harvest, which is nice if a bin is unable to achieve a hot temp, the bin is created in the winter, or there is a suspicion of severe disease in the bin.

Thoughts?

Judging by the county's website, I'm hoping that they tend towards not caring. We're still in the shopping process for this land and have ruled out two counties that are simply inhospitable to our plans.

Another option might be a yurt, but $20,000 for a structure that won't last just doesn't seem worth it when my plans call for just over $20,000 for the final building. I will give a call to the county we're currently shopping around in tomorrow and see what the deal is. I'd be okay with them saying that they won't recognize my structure, give the approval of it, let me have connections to the grid, or allow a mortgage for it. But I'm not sure I'm interested in a legal issue. At that point I'd probably just accept that fact that I'd have to live "rogue" on the land and just keep our current property as our "residence" albeit unoccupied and about 30 minutes from where we'd be doing the residing.

So, I live in Virginia. As far as I can tell the only thing that they *actually* care about is plumbing-- makes sense the state has an interest in maintaining healthy land and water and human waste plays a HUGE part in a healthy environment downstream. That said, Virginia code allows for an outhouse-- which tells me "anything goes".

So, let's say I have an outhouse that meets their requirements. But that's it. My house isn't up to code otherwise. What are they going to do? The power company won't hook me up? No problem. There is no city water anyways so that's a non-issue. As best as I can tell if you don't get a permit and you don't get the house inspected that is all that can happen, which is OK with me because we don't want electricity or water.

Am I missing something? I don't get the big stink about code. I hear about people trying to meet code with these eco houses but then when I look at the books I just don't see a problem with a house that isn't up to code. The only other thing is selling, but my land is where the money is, and my mortgage is a land mortgage not a house mortgage so it isn't a problem. And frankly, we don't ever plan on selling.

Next week dove season opens in VA. A dove is just a pigeon without the stigmatism people have towards pigeons. The problem with dove is that there is a season for them and outside of that season you can't hunt them. Being a bird on the migratory list they are also really hard to get a nuisance permit for, meaning you really are locked into their season.

While watching a Geoff Lawton video about greening the desert he showed how they were using pigeons to create manure for compost. I thought, "hey that's great. I wonder if I could do that and eat the pigeons." What makes pigeons really cool is that they'll fly all over the city eating this and that and then return to their home at night. I would only need to provide them with a home and then come up with the initial batch of pigeons, theoretically. Once this is done the pigeons ought to go out daily and eat for free and then come home at night.

Is anyone else doing this already? One concern I definitely see coming up would be "what is the 'this and that' that they are consuming?" That could/would be a concern, but then again I eat the wild dove that spends all year eating the same "this and that". Additionally, we live on very little income and so meat is something we rarely see. I don't know I'd be so opposed to eating a pigeon that has been dining on McDonald's leftovers.

David Livingston wrote:Ok this my own personal take on this their are  specific recipes out there for most bits of chicken
Like the feet ( Chinese ) and the neck ( French ) but for myself there are far too much faff and bother as there are only two of us and one chicken at a time
So I ditch the head and feet and the alimentry tract retaining the heart lungs and liver plus I detach the neck .
I roast the bird with stuffing ( sage and onion ) two meals take the white meat left and make a curry( two meals ) then boil the left over carcass take off any meat left for chicken casserole two meals and stock left bits of meal after picking over the bones plus chopped up liver heart etc goes to make a soup  so that's another two meals
Making eight meals

You should try adding the feet to the stock pot! If there was only a single part of the chicken I could make stock with it would be the feet! I know people eat the feet, but I think they taste bad. However, they are AMAZING in a stock. Rapid boil for five minutes and then throw into a pot of cold water until they are cool enough to handle. Then peel them (remove the skin) and cut off the talons (to reveal the marrow). Back into a pot and boil down. Makes such a luxurious stock because there is so much marrow and gelatine in the feet.

I will definitely see how many meals we can make. These guys are on the small side (layer breeds not broiler) but I think we can probably nab like three or four meals.

This year we bought 10 chickens, one died and we were left with 9. Of those remaining 9, five are roosters, and we will be butchering four of them this weekend.

I've never killed and butchered a chicken before, but I'm fairly confident I can do it competently (I will be killing and butchering the first chicken before proceeding with the remaining three just in case I mess up or run out of time). The concern I have is that I do not wish to waste anything! These guys have been very kind to me over the last 5ish months and I want their remains to be used by my family as efficiently as possible. My wife and I have both agreed that this is very important to us and we're both willing to try eating parts of the chicken we have never had before.

I'm not really sure what to do with the organs or the feet, but I am sure I will find a recipe to use. But what else can I use? Can the intestines be eaten? Head? What do you guys use the bones for once they have been used in a stock? How about the feathers? I'm thinking that all the refuse I can't find another use for will go into David The Good style "melon pit" but I view that as a last resort.

I figured you guys probably have a similar mindset with regard to animal life and ensuring that you use the whole animal to the best of your ability and in the most efficient and honoring manner, plus I figured you guys might have better and more unique ideas than a typical Google search or Homestead blogger.

Thanks guys.

As an experiment I dug up some of my russets and put about 12 of them into a six foot section of this new hay bed. I know others have had success growing potatoes in strictly hay.

I actually killed all the weeds with a weedwhacker. Went right down into the dirt and killed as many of the root balls as I could reach. In my experience this technique kills everything that is currently alive and then I only have to worry about new growth.

I will look into adding some more stuff (dirt, mulch, carbon, nitrogen, etc) to this bed and to my others as the summer winds down and I start converting more of the beds to this hay.

Hopefully the pests will be dealt with for next spring. We didn't have the funds to install a fence this year, but it's the first thing on the to-do list for this fall/next spring.