Building separatism

I've realized I had a good sized plum tree way at the back, behind the pigsty. The area is so overgrown I was never able to walk up to her or see what she looks like. This morning I decided to clear out all the overgrown stuff around her! So I could sit in the shade of a big tree, like I always wanted to.

It was soon obvious that I don't have the heart to cut little plum seedlings, I ended up just clearing the ground around them. There was also a hawthorn bush that was very cute and I left it to grow. I removed some bushes and invasive stuff, some of it grew so big it took ages to take down with a hand saw.

And then I saw my plum tree. She's big, but very old. Covered herself in dry branches that fell from her. I removed all the dry stuff I could. She seems fragile and like she won't live for very long. So it's good I left the seedlings to grow, when she falls they can take over. She has a few plums on but all were stiff and disfigured, nothing was edible.

I left quite a lot of invasive greenery growing because it created a mini-forest for me, and you know what I love. Mini forests. I can sit in the shade of it and you know what else, I can plant wild strawberries there. And all the plants are protected from wind in there so it's safer, nothing is going to fall in a storm. I'm pleased.

After that I was exhausted so I explored a forest to cheer myself up. I got to an area where the trees were dry and shed a lot of tree bark to the ground, it was in pieces.

I looked at it and thought, you know what. I could gather these in a bag, carry that home, and crush them into little wood chips. Then I could have a wood chip mulch like a fancy lil shit. It would mean a garden without weeds. Wood chips block everything.

Since I source all my water from the well, it's become my central space for hand washing, dish washing, plant sowing and watering, keeping all my outdoor plants; it's where I do everything water related. And I often sit and eat there too because I wanna look at plants.

I found a small bench in the wood shed, washed it, and used it as a surface to do all these things on. And then I broke it. It was old and rotten so one rough handling did it. Now I'm using a broken bench to do everything on.

And honestly there's no space. I'll wash a dish, discard it in the grass, then watch a spider crawl in and lay her eggs in it. We can't have that. I need a real table.

I've never built a table, and frankly never thought much about it either. My homemade surfaces were always wooden boards stacked on a cardboard box. Doing something I haven't premediated on for several years is uncommon for me. I don't have wifi to look at tutorials either. It's just me, old boards, hammer and nails.

When I was a kid I wasn't concerned with planning; I was grabbing hammer and nails from other people's hands just begging to let me build, let me make a birdhouse, anything. But child me didn't have a perception of 'hitting your hand wrong and hurting your fingers real bad'. Pain or injuries were irrelevant back then. Me right now is very aware that if I mess up my hands, I won't be able to knit, crochet or weave and then what?

My mind is listing through all table designs I can think of, and I wanna make this:

because I think it's simple, would hold together and has a little shelf. It would just be one board on top, two on sides, and one as a shelf. I drew this on my phone, so nobody can make fun of me okay.

I might actually just make a prototype out of some rotten boards first, to gain experience. I don't wanna waste good materials. Cutting a board with a hand saw sounds tiring. I'm so not fun as an adult, a child me would see a saw and go to town immediately. Is this what socialization did to me? Or just frontal lobe development?

I went out to water my potatoes and cover them in hay; I think they'll turn out great. Then I figured I can't breathe because my sinuses are sick, and you might wonder why. Well, as I was stuck in bed, I couldn't finish unpacking or fixing my mold-smelling clothes, so I left all the bags opened, in my bedroom... where I slept... and yeah I've been breathing in mold two nights in a row. It's still in here, I'm tired to deal with it.

In order to fix this, I figured I'd grab the soup I made yesterday, add chilli powder, heat it up, and then have hot spicy soup melt whatever is stuck in my sinuses. The soup was about to go bad, it was going acidic, but, it wasn't so bad I couldn't eat it, just on the edge. So I put it on the stove, turned the stove on, and felt a smell of.. burning wood.

I had left the pot on my wooden cutting board, and when I picked it up, the cutting board stuck to it, and got transported to the stove and now was getting exposed to the direct flames. I somehow noticed this and grabbed the cutting board before it caught on fire. It's all black and burnt now. But I have to confess, it smells amazing. It smells like barbecue. 10/10. My kitchen smells great even though I almost caused a fire. There's no fire alarms in here.

Anyway I did eat the soup and my sinuses are better. My ankle still hurts a bit but is no longer swollen. I'm most worried about the lack of thought in my brain. I broke a plate yesterday and it was the single small plate I owned. I tried to put it inside through a window where I thought the desk was. I missed.

And now even though I haven't unpacked I'm thinking about building a table.

I'm talking about this as someone who is only learning, and I'm pulling most of my knowledge from 'The humanure handbook'. I don't have much experience yet, only presenting the theory.

The compost toilet is a system of recycling human waste into fresh compost, used to fertilize gardens. If done correctly, it's sanitary, odourless, and safe for human health and population.

Here are the pros: If you own any land, it's free to do, you don't need a septic tank, you waste zero drinking water for toilet use, you gain valuable fertilizer for your garden, you don't pay for your waste to be stored or sanitized, you do zero damage to the environment. Cons: you have to learn how it works, and put in some effort to compost it.

So how does that look in practice? You have a system of collecting waste, and a protected compost pile where you empty it out in order to have it composted. The way it's made sanitary and stink-free is with the addition of organic material the waste is suspended in. It's never piled on top of each other or visible, but always covered in something like sawdust, peat moss, dry leaves, grass clippings, hay or straw.

The most common thing people do is install a nice wooden board with a toilet seat in their homes, and put a big bucket under it to collect the material. The bucket can be lined with newspapers, and the bottom is always covered with organic material. Every time the toilet is used, instead of flushing, organic material is piled on top and it covers all the smells and visuals. I can confirm it doesn't stink!

Once the bucket is full, it's carried to the compost pile. Here's where some initial effort is needed.

In order to safely compost human waste, you need to build (or procure) a composter. This is easy, you only need 4 walls, the bottom is the ground, and you need to cover it with something like a net or a wire, so animals can't get to it. It can be made out of wood, metal, bricks, plastic, whatever is available. The top should be exposed to rain. Once you have that, composting it is just like any other compost pile.

If you've composted before, you know you need a balance of different materials to make a functional compost pile; that goes for this too. The bottom should be covered in organic material, the contents of the toilet added on top, also suspended in organic matter, and then covered with light organic material. It can be hay, straw, leaves, grass clippings, garden leftovers, whatever you'd add to a normal compost pile. You don't need to turn it, because the entire mass should be airy and with access to oxygen. Then you keep adding layers of human waste and organic matter until your composter is full, and leave it to safely decompose for 2 years, only water it sometimes if it gets dry. After that period, you should find fresh humus you can use for gardening. During the curing period, you fill up another composter and you alternate between the two.

The process of how this works is described in detail in the humanure handbook; the compost pile will heat up and thermophilic bacteria will thrive in it, killing all the viruses, pathogens or anything that could be infectuous or harmful to humans. This should last for a few months, then the pile cools back down and another type of bacteria will take over the decomposing process. The worms from the ground come in to help too. The author claims this is so effective it can neutralize diseased animal corpses, nuclear waste, and most other dangerous substances; I'm not sure I believe that. But it makes sense we can compost human stuff, we use cow manure, we compost the feces of any other animal, we're no different.

I haven't found a better resource than the humanure handbook but I'd be very happy to read anything written by women about it. The male author alternates between giving you instructions and complaining about everything that happened in the history of time, it's annoying, I don't trust him. But I'm going to try the compost toilet and hopefully get some fertilizer!

An important safeguard to know is that human waste should never be anywhere close to a fresh water supply, having it mixed with water is what caused the plagues like cholera in the past. Compost toilet should not be close to any body of water, or having water run from it. It also needs to be protected from animals because they will spread it around, again contaminating water.

Storing, managing and purifying human waste is an industry that costs a lot of money, takes a lot of resources and does damage to the environment. We are constantly paying for our waste to be dealt with, flushing drinking water with it, and getting nothing out of it.

On my way back I stepped wrong and my ankle did a 'Click!' sound. I was just about to recover from my food poisoning!

I got home and put my entire foot in a cold bucket of water, in case the ankle decided to swell due to this insignificant event. It did swell. Ah well. I wrapped it in a wet cloth and got back to bed.

This is fine, in all the house renovation series I watched, there was at least one trip to the ER. Because it's people in a new environment, not yet used to it and not knowing what to watch out for. This is how we learn. My issues are fairly harmless, I'm just stuck to bed and don't need medical attention.

I was still able to get the well water up, I made the simplest food possible (boiled potatoes and some tea) and other than that it was slow. I didn't have to be anywhere so there was no stress. I was in the bed reading all day. Mostly fanfic but also the humanure handbook, which is really trying to sell me composting, as if I wasn't already a big fan.

I used to think women who mixed menstruation into the dirt were wild, but I'm considering now.....

Anyway, best of luck with your garden!!

Yess thank you for speaking about this! I've been doing it for a while, it needs 1:10 urine-water ratio, and the person providing the urine has to be healthy and not on any medication. Urine has a lot of nitrogen and trace amounts of other nutrients plants need! Excellent free fertilizer.

I thought putting together a kitchen will be a half an hour issue; it's been three days. The kitchen isn't even complete at the moment I'm typing.

After the whole 'mold under linoleum' issue was resolved, I had to drag in the vintage kitchen cabinet, put stoves in their places and drag in a long table I intended to use as a working surface. One of the stoves is a wood stove, so she has to go where the chimney is. Locked in place. I also have a big hole in the ceiling, and no clue how to fix it. I checked it out in the attic, and it seems the roof is a bit messed up, mended badly and leaking at that spot, so water damaged the wooden boards, they rotted and fell down, pushing through the mort and breaking it down. I dragged out the rotten boards but was only able to cover it with unfastened boards.

So I now have 2 boards to insulate me from the attic but the mort is constantly falling further apart, raining dust and sand on my kitchen.

So I couldn't put any working surfaces or stoves in there. It would fall down directly in my food. I placed the kitchen cabinet under it instead. It can hold some mort.

I wanted my working table to be close to the window, so I could see what I'm doing and take pretty pictures of it. But it couldn't go directly under the window because that's where my dining plant-growing table would go; kitchen has a southern facing window and I'm gonna make use of that.

And the final condition, the stoves can't be close to each other. If I used the wooden stove next to the gas stove, the heat might make the gas tank explode. And also it needed to click, the kitchen needeed to make sense to me.

Both the cabinet and the table are huge, and can only fit very few places.

So this is why I spent a whole day dragging stuff around, on this wavy old linoleum, losing my breath because the cabinet weighs a ton. I made sketches, tried all kinds of configurations, and when I thought one would work out, it just looked wrong.

After a lot of configurations, I shrunk the table a bit (it can be put back) to fit it next to a wood stove and it clicked. It looked okay. The kitchen made sense. It was even better when I put up a painting on the wall.

Now every time I walk by or into the kitchen I start grinning uncontrollably because I have a kitchen! I didn't have one before! The walls and the ceiling look like they're about to crumble but the rest looks fairy-tale level beautiful. Everything is old and second hand and found randomly, but I put my big crochet mushroom on the cabinet, I have a painting of a baby tomato plant on the wall, the tablecloth I made from scraps is on the kitchen table. It's all arranged and decorated by me! Undescribed joy.

Anyway, I am feeling bad this morning, I don't know if it's all the times I washed a vegetable with the well water and immediately ate it, or if it's because we had a bit of rain and my body overreacted. Gonna read in bed until I feel better.

edit: fuck I know whats wrong. I visited some neighbours and they gave me elderflower juice to drink, they insisted I took the whole bottle home. I thought it tasted weird, like there's no sugar in it, but drank it anyway. I downed half of that bottle. It had gone bad. I sniffed it now and it smells extremely 'gone bad'.

it's definitely a good idea to set it outside! maybe after a few days they'll find a new home?

love the new house updates-- so proud of u!!!

omg, the idea of using animal droppings I find in the house to fix the walls is so funny. It's not a bad idea! But I don't get a lot so it probably wouldn't make a difference, its like 3 spoons worth. Great idea tho!

If the holes are newer you'll see this like yellowish sawdust in the pinhole where they've been munching, and if theyre older the holes are a dark brown and more glossy (a bit like the photo)

I may be totally wrong that's what it looks like to me^^good luck!!