Worming
Let worms eat your organic waste! They will happily turn it into some of the best fertilizer on earth - worm compost, otherwise known as worm castings or vermicompost. This is a fascinating, fun, and easy way to recycle your organic kitchen wastes. Worm composting, or vermiculture, requires very little work, produces no offensive odors, and helps plants thrive. Only a few things are needed to make good worm compost: a bin, bedding, worms, and worm food.
Your bin needs to be only 8″-16″ deep, since compost worms are surface feeders. You can build your own bin, use a washtub, a dish pan, a used shipping crate, or a commercially available worm bin. Just be sure your bin has a lid to keep out flies and rodents, and holes in the bottom a quarter inch or smaller, for ventilation and drainage. The rule of thumb for bin size is two square feet of surface area per person, or one square foot of surface area per pound of food waste per week. Because worms like moderate temperatures, place your bin in a shady location where it will not freeze or overheat. Here are some good choices: kitchen corner, garage, basement, patio, outside back door, laundry room.
DeAnander:
Worms can handle more than just kitchen waste. For two years, as an experiment, I used a “sawdust toilet” (see the Humanure Handbook and related websites including the Forum)
I had no luck getting the thermophilic composting reaction going (have always had trouble with the carbon/nitrogen balance thing). So I took a leaf out of the book of some third world susti folks and introduced redworms (tiger worm, Eisenia fetida) into the humanure compost heap. Bingo! They loved it. Using recycled newspaper pet litter and garden leaves rather than sawdust (no sawmill handy), I used the composting toilet for a couple of years; one year filled about one pile contained by a wire fence about 3 feet high and 3-4 feet across (cylindrical). I let the pile sit for an additional year before using the compost (this is recommended if you don’t go the full thermo reaction route). Digging into Pile Number One after its year of rest was an exciting moment: would I find stinking muck? No! I found the most healthy, nice-smelling topsoil you could ask for, and it has returned to the garden.
I stopped the sawdust toilet routine when I made plans to sell the house — didn’t want to leave a new owner a mysterious pile in the garden containing unpleasant surprises when dug into. But I found that cellulose fibre plus worms plus humanure plus time equals topsoil as good as, or better than, anything I could buy in a sack in the garden centre. And we flush the stuff away — wasting water, wasting energy, and polluting our coastal waters and rivers.
I tried nightcrawlers in my piles but they left (they do that — wander off — if not confined in bins, or so I hear). the redworms stayed put. I also introduced a redworm or two into each of my containers when planting. they seem to help keep the soil aerated.
Anyway, worms — and even more so the larvae of the Black Soldier Fly or Hermetia are incredible magicians — like the alchemists of legend they can turn dross into gold, that is, potentially hazardous waste into valuable, essential topsoil. And they don’t even ask for overtime pay. They just work around the clock, 24×7, processing whatever you feed them.
8 January 2007, 12:59 amLegume Sam:
How long does the humanure take before it decomposes into a form which doesn’t smell so much?
8 January 2007, 9:25 pmDeAnander:
The piles never smelled bad generally. Nor does the sawdust bucket toilet, if properly used. People tend to think “pit toilet” or “outhouse” or “latrine trench” and gag reflexively, but really if done right there is no stench. The only smelly moment comes when emptying the toilet into the compost pile, and then only for a few seconds.
I did this experiment in a dense suburban neighbourhood with my neighbour’s back door only about 15 feet away over a 5 ft fence. He never noticed a thing. I even asked him once if he noticed my compost piles and he said no (I didn’t mention what kind of composting I was doing!)… so stench was not a problem.
The #1 important thing in stench-reduction is to separate urine and dispose of it separately, not let it sit around in the bucket forming ammonia compounds. This is a departure from the Jenkins approach but imho a very worthwhile one. Unless you build or buy a special toilet with separation sluice, the simple solution is to pee into one container and poop in a different one (the sawdust bucket).
Peeing in a large jug or any container with a tight fitting lid is practical; adding a tablespoon or so of sugar for every 1-2 gallons tends to neutralise the smell in the storage jug. The pee can be distributed around the yard at any time — pouring it all out in any one spot is not recommended as you may get a nitrogen burn, but if it is shared out among many different shrubs and plants it’s beneficial. There is a slight urinal smell when the pee is poured out but if your soil is moist and healthy this will vanish in seconds. You can also pour it down gopher holes if you subscribe to the theory that it repels gophers
Before anyone asks, yes there is a particular challenge for women trying to pee into any kind of jug or storage container with a narrow neck opening; however there are little female peeing aids like the Lady J (google for it) which can be very helpful in this regard.
The essential ingredient in using the sawdust toilet and compost pile successfully is the filler material (litter, sawdust, shredded paper, leaf mulch, whatever). It has to be fine enough to drift over new deposits and blanket them, allowing air to circulate but preventing smells from escaping. This sounds bizarre but it does really work. Basically instead of flushing the toilet, you dump in a couple of handfuls or scoops of filler material, making sure to cover the deposit completely. I kept my sawdust loo (a 5 gallon white plastic utility bucket with a standard loo seat available at any camping supply store) in the bathroom
right next to my bathtub. It never made an obnoxious stench — and I’m fairly sensitive to nasty smells and would not have tolerated it in the house had it been stinky. I was worried at first that it would be disgusting, but it wasn’t. Some users might be a bit put off by the escape of a bit more odour than they are accustomed to during use (since the humanure isn’t falling into a pool of water) but on the other hand, there’s no splashing 
I tried various filler materials and finally settled on recycled newspaper pet litter in compressed bundles. Compressed coir brick, reconstituted with water, was also very successful. If I lived near a sawmill I would have used sawdust. Leaf litter was too coarse and would need to be crushed or ground to be fine enough for the blanketing effect.
The trick with the pile is the same: you need to blanket the top of each new deposit with filler material so that no humanure is exposed to the air to emit smells. I would dig into the pile (with a special dedicated small garden shovel not used for other purposes) and make a low spot, dump the bucket into this low spot, and then cover the top with my favourite filler material of all — cocoa bean hulls from the garden centre. They are a great mulching material, a side/waste product of the chocolate industry, and they smell delightfully like chocolate
I guess I could have used them in the loo indoors too, but they were kind of bulky and messy to have in the house.
The sides of the cylindrical piles I built up with garden waste — twigs, wisteria cuttings, etc. — so that the “offensive” part of the pile was always contained in an insulating jacket of dead vegetable matter.
The bucket would then be rinsed out with a hard spray from the garden hose, the rinse water dumped onto the pile (redworms like moisture), and the bucket set to dry out facing into the sun. I had three buckets (they are cheap!) so that the one currently being brought into the house for use had been out in the sun and air for 2 weeks to dry out. It was a simple system and apart from one extra chore every Saturday morning (do the loo compost) it was a fairly low time investment. I must have saved thousands of gallons of water over those 2 years of the experiment, and I still wince a little every time I flush a toilet, knowing that the waste of water is totally unnecessary.
A side benefit of knowing how to do this and having the basics (filler material and a bucket and a compost pile and some worms) available, is that in the event of a civic emergency that cuts off water supplies, you don’t have a serious hygiene problem at your house. You have latrine facilities even if the city stops delivering fresh water.
I observed the 1-year rest time for the pile because that is what’s recommended from a health/safety point of view to allow all the harmful organisms in human waste to die a natural death. Most composting toilet plans for a permanent installation involve two composting chambers, one for use and one “resting”. When the idle chamber has rested enough, you empty it out (lovely fluffy compost) and start re-using it and letting the other one rest. Basically I was doing the same thing with two compost piles, one active and one resting (like the old joke about Beethoven sitting in his grave quietly de-composing).
9 January 2007, 3:09 am