Sallygardens Smallholding

Ode to a Compost Toilet

Last week I was invited by a friend to see their poo, in a compost toilet.  An earlier post here on Sallygardens about the possibility of using compost toilets and tree bogs got so much attention and feedback from readers that I thought I'd keep you filled in on my humanure adventures.

Many people have a compost toilet indoors which they empty every few days into an outdoor compost heap. This is the most efficient way for the composting process to work. Others build a compost toilet outdoors which is what my friend has done. He uses it as much as possible, even though he has a conventional indoor flushable toilet. As he explains, it's such a waste to flush away all those nutrients which are simply going to pollute the local groundwater via his 'legal' septic tank system. It makes much more ecological sense to reuse the household human waste by composting it aerobically which means all the pathogens are killed over the course of a years composting and when done properly does not contaminate groundwater or create any bad smells. It also saves enormously on water usage in the home, it makes no sense to use water in vast quantities which has been cleaned expensively to flush away human waste. He far prefers to take a dump outdoors in his tree bog, looking out on nature.

The outdoor tree bog of his type needs emptying out once every year or two and I was invited to come along to watch. I wanted to see for myself how human manure composts and see if it smelled at all. When it was prized open there were a few bits of toilet paper on the top layer, but no smell and there was no visible evidence of what one might expect to see. The entire pile was sweet smelling, earthy, dark and crumbly. It resembled peat moss in composition and was delightful in appearance and aroma, it was quite impossible to equate this lovely nutrient rich and moist (but not soggy) earth with its former appearance. I also immediately thought how infinitely more pleasant it is to deal with this sweet smelling compost than with the dreaded anaerobic stinking bath of toxic wretch inducing swill that fills our septic tanks and quite often requires unblocking and emptying.

My vote is for compost toilets.

Bubble Bubble Without Too Much Toil Or Trouble

It's that time of year when various rooms in the household greet their occupants with a welcoming 'bloop, bloop, bloop' noise. A selection of homemade country wines are fermenting away. Good old glass gallon demijohns sit on available shelves or nestle in corners containing liquids of beautiful colours, ranging from gold to pink,  just doing their thing. It's really very easy to make country wine, in fact so easy I have found in the past that the biggest pitfall is to make too much so that the racking and bottling becomes a chore. So these days I make one demijohn each of my favourite flavours and that way it's all enjoyable and the wines are savoured.

 

Some favourites include elderflower, strawberry, blackberry, nettle leaf, birch sap wine and mead. The whole affair is very cheap, the only real expense being roughly 1.5kilos of sugar per gallon of liquid plus a good quality yeast and yeast nutriment powder. Even with the cost of the demijohns and other minor bits of equipment  in the first year the wine is easily less than half the price and in subsequent years probably under a euro per bottle. That's a significant saving on the weekly shop!

I've been meaning to write an ebooklet on this topic for some time and I finally found the inspiration I was looking for to get me going during the first racking of an elderflower and strawberry wine I'm making ... an unintended sampling was forced upon me during the syphoning process ... accidently on purpose, several times, eh, by me! When I first started out making the wine it took quite a bit of time gathering the information and sourcing the things I'd need, getting to grips with a bit of science, realising lots of information was not necessary and quite a few things tasted disgusting! So there is now a short ebooklet in the Paypal store (see top right column) with instructions on how to make our favourite country wines here at Sallygardens.

Slainte (cheers).

Anyone for Afternoon Tea?

Russian Comfrey tea is a wonderful free fertiliser for your vegetable or flower garden but not for human consumption! A harvest of leaves can be cut from your comfrey plants at least twice during summer, I get three or four harvests from our plants in the polytunnel. Simply bruise the foliage in a bucket and fill with water, preferably rainwater. Leave the broth to fester for a few weeks, this happens quicker if you keep it inside a polytunnel but you may find the smell repulsive! It soon turns to a black liquer which needs to be diluted 15:1 for use on flowering or fruiting plants. 

The comfrey plant has a very deep tap root which brings up many trace elements and minerals from deep below the soil where these nutrients often lie out of reach for mainstream plants. The leaves can also be thrown on the compost heap to boost its value or chopped and dug into vegetable beds.

I like Russian Comfrey as it does not set seed and so is less invasive, spreading via root cuttings instead.

Broody Hen At Work

It's very handy having a broody hen, she will sit on and try to hatch anything spherical. She'd even sit on golf balls, apples, anything vaguely round in shape! This little hen sat on nine fat Aylesbury duck eggs for us, laid by our own duck, and she hatched eight of them. She proudly escorted her flock of ducklings around the field, not once questioning why they had flat bills and webbed feet! After a few days we put a paddling pool out for them and the ducklings were thrilled however the broody hen was most alarmed by her babies insistence on swimming and diving!

The drake, however, was not at all impressed by the arrival of ducklings, even though they were his own offspring. He managed to kill one and new fencing had to be erected pronto to provide a safe area for the ducklings to forage.

New Arrivals on the Farm

Early summer is a busy busy time on a smallholding. One of the things that happens is the arrival of kids and over the course of  a few weeks we keep a check on the expectant mothers at regular intervals during the day. In previous years it's been easy to see when a goat is in labour, but I always missed the births by minutes, usually finding the kids as they were being licked clean. This year I was thrilled to witness the birth of Willows two kids and as usual she needed no intervention at all. She had a doe and then a big buck.

For some reason known only to herself she rejected the little doe. For the first few days we had to milk Willow and although we tried feeding the kid by bottle, she preferred to drink straight from the bucket. Once she was quick on her feet she fed straight from her Mum by employing some clever tactics. When the buck went to suckle she would run up between Mums hind legs and suckle too, in secret! I even saw her lie on her back once to wangle her way in. Its sad she has been rejected by her Mum, but she plays and sleeps with her brother and another adult doe has taken kindly to her too.

Home Cured Chorizo and Salami

The salami and chorizo are both cured and ready to eat. It took roughly three months for them to air dry sufficiently. Every so often, when out getting wood, I'd have a quick grope of the sausages hanging from the roof. Once they were no longer 'squishy' they were good to go.

It's at this point that most first timer air dried sausage adventurers begin to doubt themselves, or rather their sausages, because the final product ticks all the boxes in the 'do not eat this if you wish to live' category. It is after all raw meat, raw meat that's been hanging outside and not in a fridge, for months. Add to that the fact that the sausage is wrinkled and mouldy. The mouldy hillocks range in colour from white, to grey, to blue, brown and black. Of course all the previous preparations have been done under very clean and hygenic conditions and careful informed decisions made as to what, if any, preservatives are to be used.

To give you an idea of what to expect here is a picture of our latest chorizo. It was delecious ... only 6 more metre long sausages of various flavours to go!

Air Dried Hams and Salami

The pigs are no longer foraging the front lawn. The lawn has been sown with wildflower seed and the pigs are now pork. As the previous air dried hams were such a culinary success we decided to make four air dried hams. You can never have too much air dried ham, it's an absolute delight. Similarly you can never have too much saussison or salami which is why we made less sausage and more salami this time too. The only problem is the waiting and salivating in anticipation. We shouldn't have too much longer to wait for the salami but the hams were so large it could be another three months before they are ready. However, it's most certainly worth the wait.

We hang the salami in a muslin lined chicken wire cage and the hams are wrapped in cotton pillowcases to deter scavangers.

 

So we are without pigs at the moment but hope to get more weaners in July which is good timing as it means we will have more pork to process in the Autumn. October is a great time to be working on pork. It means the weaners have been growing during spring and summer when wild food is bountyfull and the weather warm, so the extra foraging they do adds to their flavour and the concentrate feed we give them goes further as less calories are burn't off to keep warm. And ideally, in October, there are few flies and the weather is cool, ideal conditions for butchering.

Appreciating Resilience

One of the words that keeps popping up all through any permaculture book or website you'll dip into is 'resilience'. At first I didn't really appreciate the value of this word, and what it might mean for our own family, but as the economic downturn packs some serious punches the term is making a lot more sense. 'Resilience' isn't just a fashionable permaculture buzzword.

 

In a nutshell, whenever you look at your living space (indoors and out) you should always ask yourself the questions 'how can I utilise this space/item/object for more than one use?','if this breaks how will I continue ... is there an alternative source of water/fuel/food/shelter/cooking/travel etc?'. Whenever we add something to our life, our home or our garden I always ask how I'd cope without it, or what alternatives we could use instead. I walk around our house and garden and I look at how we've set things up. I ask all the same questions ... how would I water this polytunnel if the pump and automatic watering system failed, where would I source water if our water supply was to be cut off. Water is one of the first things to ask ourselves about. We are lucky to have a stream at the side of our property and a lake at the back, plus plenty of roof area to collect rainwater if needed. Another main area is fuel ... how would we heat our home if we couldn't afford oil, or travel to buy coal. Again, luckily we have a woodland plantation which provides us with heating fuel and so we rarely buy fuel these days. Cooking of food? What if electricity is cut off or we can no longer afford gas cylinders? One plan for this summer is to build an earth oven in the garden for such occasions. And as for food, what if the supermarket supply chain fails and there's no food on the shelves ... sourcing local markets or growers, and growing your own suddenly becomes much more than just a fulfilling pleasure.

Apart from being fun it also makes sense to build our resilience. With the global economic downturn I've suddenly felt the welcoming cushioning effect of all these little steps of resilience built into our lives, which up until now, I'd have barely acknowledged their presence. But they are there and we planned it that way, thanks to reading up on permaculture. At the very worst case scenario it boils down to survival, at it's current level it helps keep life on a steady and even keel. There is still food on the table and we know we have many of the resources we need on the doorstep in order to continue living the life we've been enjoying.

Of course we are far from self sufficient, but we've never aimed to be that. It's more about living sustainably, and building resilience into life is one little part of that.

Selecting Seeds for Spring

It's that time of year again when the seed catalogues arrive in the post. It's a great lift for the spirits to leaf through the pages and begin selecting whats to be grown this year. After a few months of pretty much nothing happening in the garden you can start to look forward to the beginning of the cycle all over again. It won't be long now until the seeds are placed in compost trays and their small green tips push up through to the light. The miracle of these tiny seeds growing so vigourously in the spring and summer seasons is always a thrill to watch ... and eat!

Sitting in front of a winter fire and discussing what varieties and types of plants to grow is always a pleasure and something to be savoured. This year we have quite a few seeds left over from last year which have kept well, so we don't actually have to buy a lot of stock.

One thing that's always tempting is to buy too many varieties of each thing, but  I've learnt to concentrate on a few items and try to do them really well, rather than become bogged down with tons of seed packets, which I'd never realistically be able to sow and grow!

The vegetables and polytunnel have always been my 'department' but now that I'm on the traditional Irish music course every morning himself will be learning to take the lead in the garden and I'll be his assistant when I get home. It's a good thing that we both learn the logistics of all the various farm areas.

So what are we sowing this year? A sample includes mange tout, sugar snap peas, dwarf purple, golden and green French beans, spinach, chard, courgette, sweet corn, kale, mixed salad leaves, pak choi, stir fry oriental leaves, onions, garlic, pumpkin, parsnip, carrot, potato, kohl rabi, brussel sprout, brocolli to name a few.

If you are starting out growing for the first time I have an eBooklet that gives advice on how to get started. The main points are to choose hardy and reliable plants so ensure success but also to start small with just a few items and add to that each year.

Merry Christmas Everyone