From the Survival Blog
One of the many important problems
confronting people in a SHTF situation is maintaining adequate sanitation.
Clean water, soap, personal hygene, toileting, and kitchen waste will all need
to be addressed. I am going to describe some of the things we do on our 1/4
acre suburban homestead to control waste and feed the plants we use for food.
It seems to me that having an established system in place to deal with waste
before SHTF is better that trying to cobble something together when all kinds
of urgent needs have to be addressed in an emergency. A good composting program
that is established before SHTF may save a few years of frustration, garbage,
vermin, and despair.
I begin with a disclaimer: We live in
the coastal Pacific Northwest. Winters here are cool and rainy, summers are
warm and dry. Any description of how we do things may need to be adapted to
work well in other climates. All biological activity in compost piles is
temperature dependent. Organic matter will break down more quickly in warm
weather than in cool weather, and may stop completely during very cold weather.
Tailor you efforts to the environment you live in.
What is compost? My definition is
that compost is organic material that is reduced by biological processes into a
more stable form. By "more stable" I mean less prone to decay.
Composting is a kind of directed rotting process; the end product can slowly
degrade, but no longer "rots" with the associated smells and disease
hazards.
What can be composted? The complete
answer to this question is somewhat complicated, but generally any small,
non-toxic, soft plant materials (like leaves, stalks, and kitchen wastes) can
be composted without any problems. Animal products and things like paper and
small tree branches can be composted too, but the process is a bit more
elaborate. Simple composting of vegetable matter and animal waste is easy,
clean, and safe.
How does composting work? Organic materials
are arranged in a way that encourages decomposition-- a process of organic
substances being broken down into simpler forms of matter with the help of
insects and microorganisms. What remains after these organic materials are
consumed and "broken down" is a biologically stable humus called
compost.
Why would anybody want to compost? Composting reduces
potentially offensive organic materials such as garbage, yard waste, and animal
waste into an inoffensive soil-like substance that is a beneficial source of
plant nutrition in gardens, flowerbeds, and woodlots. In a SHTF situation,
waste of all sorts will need to be dealt with in a way that protects public
health and reduces the unpleasant effects of rotting garbage-- disease, odors,
rats, insects, and diminished morale.
How do we make compost? There is a lot
written about composting, much of what I have read is unneccesarily
complicated. Composting is basicially accellerating a natural process-- the
breakdown and recycling of organic material. Many sources I have read specify a
certain mix of ingredients; many sources recommend physically moving compost
materials to "mix and aerate" them. The purpose of all that mixing is
to accelerate the decomposition process and generate enough heat within the
compost pile to kill weed seeds and disease. My experience is that mixing,
layering, and blending are not necessary. What those activities do is speed up
the composting process by the additon of muscle energy or mechanical energy,
which is not needed if enough time is allowed for material to break down
naturally. If you throw all your yard waste into a heap and leave it exposed to
the weather, in four years it will be compost. So, we can actively manage our
compost pile by shoveling and mixing and aerating, or we can let it all sit
there in a dumb lump for four or five years, and it will be ready for use in the
garden, orchard, woodlot, or ornamental plant bed. Leaving the heap to break
down without physical mixing is called "cold composting", and it
works just fine, only slower. I should add that leaves alone will pack down
like pages in a book and be very slow to break down. This can be remedied by
shredding the leaves, and/or adding other ingredients like twigs, grass
clippings, kitchen garbage, straw, and plant stalks to the compost pile to
improve aeration and reduce compaction.
The argument can be made that cold
composting doesn't generate the heat necessary to kill disease organisms
(collectively called "pathogens"), or weed seeds. I agree to a point,
but compostable materials (including feces), are not plutonium and don't need
300,000 years to degrade. Eventually most organic materials become safe because
almost everything organic is food to some living thing. Even bacteria and
viruses are food for other organisms. Once a thing has been eaten and excreted,
it is not the same as it was before being eaten. Obviously, do not compost
materials infested with disease or parasites; burn them. If in doubt, burn.
What should be done with the finished
compost? Compost is plant food. If fecal matter has been included in the
compost, it may be preferable to use it on non-food crops or food crops that
are neither consumed raw nor allowed to come into direct contact with the soil.
Such compost would be well suited for use on woodlots or decorative plantings.
If growing your own food is a life and death part of a SHTF situation, I
speculate that there are far greater threats to survival than the application
of properly prepared compost to food crops. In our garden, compost without
fecal matter has replaced almost all fertilizer.
What are the dangers of cold
composting? A properly built compost pile should not provide shelter for
rodents or other nuisance animals. Kitchen waste is especially attractive to
animals and should be put into the center of a hot working pile, or cold
composted in containers that prevent access by rats, mice, opossums, raccoons,
dogs, or any other animals. Compost that is not adequatly heated may contain
viable weed seeds-- a problem for the garden, but not important for the purpose
of neutralizing nuisance materials. We haven't had any weed problems with
well-aged compost. Raw materials put into a compost pile may contain organisms
that can cause disease to plants as well as people and animals. At our home, we
do compost fecal matter from dogs, but it is isolated for three years before
being added into an active cold compost pile, where it will be composted for
another three years or more. Our dogs are healthy, and I believe the chance of
disease is small; still, the compost containing dog feces is used for non food
plants at this time.
How do we get started composting?
We have a spot (heap) about 4 x 12
feet where we toss everything compostable that has no other place to go. It is
confined by wire fencing and is about 4 feet high. Leaves, grass clippings,
sawdust, tree trimmings, chicken litter, and fir needles all go onto the heap.
Four years into the future, the center of this heap will be ideal compost. Dog
waste is composted separately in barrels for three or four years and then
tossed on the bottom of the heap, where it has contact with soil for an
addtional three or four years. As the heap is shoveled out from one end, the
undisturbed end of the heap keeps working.
We have plastic garbage cans with
holes drilled into them that we use to begin composting yard and kitchen waste
before the can is dumped into the larger composting pile. Instead of hauling
waste materal to one location in small loads, we have multiple cans placed
around the property near where we generate and gather waste material, such as
yard debris and kitchen waste.
Animal waste attracts flies. It takes
a few years to establish a composting environment that limits houseflies--
another good reason to start composting before SHTF. A few years ago we started
managing dog waste by putting it in above ground barrels that were aerated by
holes drilled in the sides and bottom. It has worked surprisingly well.
Houseflies have things that parasitize them; one being a mite that will kill
houseflies in astonishing numbers. I have seen flies in our dog waste barrel so
burdened by mites that they could not fly. Seeing that was like watching a
1950's horror movie. We have fewer houseflies now than we had before we started
the dog barrel composting. Treating dog waste in a barrel is nearly odorless
and not offensive. The waste is reduced in quantity and becomes compost--
neutral, odorless, and neighbor-friendly.
In our dog waste compost barrel, the
mites that killed the houseflies were succeeded the following year by a kind of
grub that is the larva of the black soldier fly. These grubs look like the
mealworms that one can buy as fish or reptile food in pet stores, except that
"compost maggots" are a dirty gray instead of beige with tan stripes,
like mealworms.
We are fortunate to have black
soldier flies colonize in our yard. Black soldier flies don't go in the house.
The adult form doesn't live long and isn't a nuisance. The larvae eat amazing
amounts of waste; I have fed them inedible meat scraps and waste grease from
the kitchen (things normally not recommended for composting). The black soldier
fly larvae eat it all, very quickly. I watched a piece of spoiled salt pork
half as big as my fist disappear in three days, fat and all. Black soldier fly
larvae migrate out of the compost, after they have matured, to seek a place in
the soil to pupate and complete their life cycle. Our chickens love the
migrating larvae!
Composting is safe and odor-free when
done properly, and it creates a useful product while eliminating a potential
source of odors, vermin, and disease. It would be prudent for all preppers to
learn how to compost before the Schumer hits the fan, when they will be
confronted with a waste problem that gets bigger every day.
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