Night Soil collection services.

OK, so in an earlier post I promised I'd talk about why exporting too many vegetables from my garden wasn't a good idea. I also mentioned the composting toilet. So I figure Maybe now is a good time to talk about my latest venture.

In it's most general sense, plants convert matter in soil into vegetables and fruits. Specific sorts of matter are very important to the process, without them nothing happens. The crops remove these nutrients from the soil, and in order to keep growing anywhere long term, you need to put these nutrients back in the soil in similar amounts. Normal agri-industrial methods involve chemical fertilizers. But those are unsustainable and polluting. Every gardener knows the importance of compost. But if you compost all your scraps, all your garden waste, there is still a large portion of what you've taken out unaccounted for. You CAN put 99% of what you take out of the ground back, but only if you compost ALL your waste. That means your shit.

Every vegetable that leaves your garden is nutrients from your land that are never going back to your land. They may go back to someone else's land, but that doesn't help you. if you trade, you have to import as many nutrients in the form of fertalizer as you export.

Well, the chinese had a solution for the last 5000 years. The farmers sold the city folk their crops, and the city folk sold the farmers their shit. Seriously, someone would come around in the morning and pay for people's chamberpot contents. These would then be composted and used later to grow more crops. Closed cycle.

One other major advantage to composting your shit is that it preserves water. A flush toilet literally has you pollute clean water every time you shit, which is a sin like few other when drinkable water is so scarce.

So in order to keep my land nice and nutrient rich, while I'm giving away so many seeds and veggies to make friends, I've started up a night soil collection. I've made composting toilets for all my neighbors, and explained that this will cut down their water use. I told them I'd come by every morning and pick it up, so they wouldn't have to worry about it. They don't really know or understand that I'm composting it, they just know I'm getting rid of it for them. So far 3 houses have agreed to try it out, so we'll see where this goes.