A Warning About Straw

...tch chicken droppings! Straw is a very inexpensive and useful material for composting, mulching and animal bedding (we use it for all of these purposes). If you use it for mulch you’ll probably get some seeds that will germinate, but I’ve never found it to be a big problem in a small vegetable garden. I get my straw from the feed store, but you can often get it for free from yuppies on Craigslist who have bought it to give their parties the Hee Ha...

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Mutant Squash

Today’s incredible picture comes from photographer, bike cultist, and composting Culver-Town revolutionary Elon Schoenholz. It’s a freak squash that grew out of his regular old household compost. The funny thing is that nobody at the Shoenholz Compound – neither Elon, wife Bryn nor new bambina Nusia eat squash – so the origin of this new hybrid compost squash is a mystery. This brings up a bit of botany. Plants “do the deed” with flowers which co...

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Save the World–Poop in a Bucket

Learn about composting your own poo by checking out our new post, How to Save the World by Pooping in a Bucket, at the consciousness shifting blog Reality Sandwich, for which we write a regular column. And should you want more potty talk you’re in luck due to a minor sewage synchronicity going on in the magazine/internet world. As we wrote our meditation on human waste, a number of other stories on the subject came out at the same time: Wasteland...

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Lady Urine, Water Conservation and Halfway Humanure

...psychological leap. (It’s actually a great stepping stone to full humanure composting, if that’s your goal). The material you collect can go straight onto your regular compost pile–no special treatment required–and it’s a valuable resource. So, to sum up this meandering post, while Erik is “watering” the straw bales, I think I’m going to be collecting my nitrogen inputs in the dry toilet. (That it, unless I trot myself down to the AutoZone and get...

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