Humanure (Poop in a Bucket)

The label on the shavings bucket says "chocolate peanut butter parfait" 

Welcome to a frank blog discussion about poop. We're not sure how many of you will be familiar with the term humanure, but we're confident you can figure out what it means. On our first day here at Wild Roots we were introduced to the concept of pooping in a bucket, and (surprisingly) it did not take long to get used to. The entire toilet system consists of a large ice cream bucket set inside a wooden box with a toilet seat and lid attached. Before anyone wrinkles their nose though, we must testify that the process of composting human waste is much cleaner and less smelly than we're sure you're imagining. The bucket is lined with a layer of clean wood shavings, and when you are finished your business, if you have anything to cover or if it seems very wet in there, you simply sprinkle in some more shavings. And always put the lid down. The best part of it is all you can ever smell is wood shavings. Seriously. It makes the concept of pooping into water seem filthy. Plus, the toilet can kind of go anywhere, in any room you want to designate as a toilet area. One of the toilets here is in a room we can only equate to the Room of Requirement in Harry Potter, which means we never run out of things to look at and have even started a game of toilet-time I Spy.

We dug out a pile from 2008/2009 yesterday.

Once the bucket is full, it is a matter of taking it outside to a compost pile and dumping it. This is the only part of the process that can be a bit smelly (believe us when we say urine smells much worse than poop) but it's no worse than walking into a dirty public washroom or changing a diaper. Humanure takes a long time to break down/be digested by micro-organisms properly, and so Jane and Thom have a chronological sequence of compost piles that are each allowed to sit for at least two (usually three or four) years before being used in the garden. The compost piles are a mixture of humanure and regular kitchen scrap compost plus layers of hay and dead plants to keep the whole thing tidy and minimize housefly action (which can spread poop particles like nobody's business). After years of decomposing, the whole pile looks very much like soil and can be used just like regular compost. When you think about how much water they're saving, and the fact that this is how the nutrient cycle is supposed to go, and how expensive and potentially harmful the sewage treatment process can be, it makes you wonder why more people aren't pooping into buckets themselves.