Composting update....

So, it has now been about two weeks since we made the compost "bocachi" with the contents of our compost toilet. The response to the last post on this subject has been very interesting...and at times revealing.

I am happy to report that the compost heated up very nicely for a few days. It also lost about 8 inches in height in the box...a really visible decrease in volume. After that (this is only about 5 days after making the pile) it cooled down to where you could not feel heat above the tubes anymore, just in the pile itself.

(Kevin next to the settled pile after one week; it started as high as the screening)

We decided to mix the pile to kickstart it again and ensure complete composting. Mixing, or turning the compost serves to mix the un-composted materials into the center, stir more space and oxygen into the materials, and promote microoganism growth. We turned the compost just by opening the box, shoveling it all out, shoveling it a bit to mix it, and shoveling it all back in. While it never did regain the high heat of the first few days it did heat up nicely and is warm to the touch just an inch or so below the surface.

(Kevin turning the compost before putting it back in the bin.)

When we turned it we found that the whole contents of the pile had become fairly uniform in color and texture. There were still bits of banana tree and leaves that were identifiable, but on the whole it was well on the way to looking and smelling just like good black soil. We were very happy with the results so far just based on 7 days time. We could almost taste big tomatoes.

(The humanuare compost after just 5 days of composting time...looking good!)

We also co-taught a class about making a compost pile with MIDA (the national agricultural ministry) on Friday and used a sample from our pile to show what was possible in 2 weeks time. During the class we worked with the students to make a sample pile that will then be used in the school garden when we get it started (waiting on the rain to arrive as the school does not reliably have water). The class went well and much fun was had by the students (all adults). We also gave away compost tea (a liquid form of compost fertilizer) as prizes for people who correctly answered questions about compost at the end of class.

(April (on the left) and the community watching the hands-on portion of compost pile creation)

(The men working on spreading bala leaves in the first level of the pile)

(The women working on spreading bala leaves in a later level of the pile)

However, while we told the community that we made our pile with manure, we didn't mention that it was humanure. We aren't sure they're all ready for that, and we don't want them to think we are so far out there that they decide to dismiss all of our ideas as too far-fetched to try.

Reforestation....the first steps

One of the projects that we are working on on the isla is reforestation of areas around streams and natural springs. Reforestation will help protect them from solar evaporation. Having trees around them really aids in conservation of water and minimizes erosion contamination. Most of the community has problems with having access to water at some point in the 4-5 months of the annual dry season...so this is a big issue for them.

Well, we officially (and literally) broke ground on May 8th. Together with 6 of our Panamanian friends we filled almost 500 1-liter size nursery bags (supplied by the ANAM, the environmental agency) with a mixture of good soil and fertilizer (supplied by ANAM as well). We used chemical fertilizer this time but next time we will have finished compost and use that compost instead. We are not using compost right now because we only have the humanure compost that is close to ready...and we have garden plans for that.

We filled the bags by breaking up the topsoil in a very nice spot near our house. We then measured out 25 gallons of soil with 5 gallon buckets (the regular measuring tool here) and mixed in 1 lb of chemical fertilizer. We mixed it just like it was concrete and then gathered round and stuffed it into bags until they were bien lleno (good ´n full).

(Filling bags with community members)

(Storing bags on a cleared spot just behind our house)

Filling the bags took us all about 4 hours. We were lucky to have a cloudy morning to work in and the temperatures were nice until the sun broke out in the final hour. We also had one man working with us that kept up a constant and funny conversation...his talking did more good for the morning's work than his hands...but everyone does what they are good at right?

(The completed bags - some more are out of site in the front row - and the workers)

The next step in the process is to plant the tree seeds. Large seeds will go straight into the bags, and small seeds will get planted into sand and only the strong sprouts will get transplanted into bags. We will raise them in bags for about 4 months to give them a good head start and then transplant them out into the land around the fuentes de agua (water sources). If planted by the end of August or early September they should have enough time to establish good roots before the dry season arrives again.

Happy Birthday to Kevin

Just wanted to say
Happy 34th Birthday!
to Kevin.

Keving spent his birthday dealing with lots of sh#t.
He collected horse sh#t.
He helped clean our composting toilet.
He helped lead a meeting to put soil (which is composted sh#t) into bags to grow trees.
He generally worked hard and shot the sh#t.

So, when it was time to decorate his cake this is what he got:

resulting in the biggest laugh of the day.

The brownies were also very good...not over or undercooked, that helped make the day better too.
Life is good down here. No sh#t.

World Series in Panama

Last week was the World Series.

Well, the Panama version.

Even though the entire country is the area of South Carolina and has just 3 million people, there are about 9 to 12 teams in the Major League here, one (or more) from each province, and they can be pretty fanatical about their teams and province identity. Veraguas, our province, is Los Indios, or the indians, and you'll see hats looking very much like the Cleveland Indians on a lot of folks; one of our friends has a hat with the Indian on the front and "Clevenland" - with an extra "n" - on the back, possibly a misprint from the US. (I don't know for sure the number of teams because we don't have TV or listen to the games on the radio much, and it is never clear to me which provinces have combined teams, and which have more than one.)

The season isn't long, starting sometime in January or so, after the youth leage has played their games after the rains stopped, and finishing in mid-April. This year, Veraguas apparently made it into the championships. And we were in Santiago, our provincial capital, on the night of Game 6. We had to win to stay in. We were downtown, and found out that they (not sure who "they" are) had set up two Huge Screen TVs and massive speakers (you must have things very loud for some reason) for folks to watch the game. Probably 250 people had collected to watch, groan, cheer, and yell as the game progressed.

Here is the scene in the square sometime in the second inning.

In the end, Veraguas lost the game and Los Santos won the championship. But we enjoyed watching the families and people watching the game.

Composting Latrines

It isn’t gross, so keep reading.

Our house was just a storage room and office before we moved in, without a spot to go to the bathroom, a deficiency we had to remedy before moving in. It is just a few feet above high tide level so we figured a normal latrine (with a nine-foot deep hole) would likely hit water quickly, and since we’re only going to be there for a short time, we didn’t want to make any huge permanent changes. So we did some research, talked to some Environmental Health sector volunteers, read some of a book titled The Humanure Handbook, and decided to go with a composting toilet.

Now please know that the system that we are about to describe is tailored to our needs and does not follow exactly any of the systems that Peace Corps or The Humanure Handbook recommend. However, we did keep a healthy respect for all of the sanitary and pathogen related issues involved. We carefully used the concepts taught by those respected sources to try to make a system that was going to be safe, sanitary, and yield pathogen-free results while fitting the needs of our housing site.

First, what is compost? Compost is the process of using the soil’s normal microorganisms to eat organic materials (plant based products like leaves, coffee grounds, grass, paper, sticks, vegetable waste, manures, etc.) and turn them into rich healthy soil. Normally composting is done by putting together a pile of organic matter so that the pile has the right conditions to encourage those microorganisms to be happy, multiply rapidly, and thus to eat more organic materials. When the conditions are right the microorganisms actually produce heat from all of their liveliness and this heat can kill weed seeds and pathogens in the compost pile.

Why use human waste in a compost pile? Well, any gardener or farmer can tell you that manure is good for plants and the health of the soil. If you look at the main nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus, and sodium or NPK) values contained in various types of manure, horse and cow are good but chicken poo has very high values. Well, human manure has values comparable to a chicken in sodium and phosphorus. Nitrogen is higher in chicken poo…but that is found in human urine. So all told our waste has real potential for being a valuable source of fertilizer. Also, humanure is abundant (each adult produces roughly ½ lb. a day) and easily available. It does need to be treated to kill any pathogens that could spread illnesses before use…but cow and horse manure should also be composted to kill weed seeds that are capable of growing after a trip through the animal.

So what did we do? We purchased a 55-gallon barrel with removable lid (very similar to our old grease collection barrels from our greasecar system back in Maryland, if you ever saw those), cut a hole, attached a seat,

ran a funnel and tube to separate the urine (as recommended in a large collection system like ours, whereas smaller 5-gallon systems like in The Humanure Handbook do not separate), got a few sacks of sawdust (both fine, from a woodshop, and large, from a chainsaw),

and went about our business. The idea is that after every deposit you cover the poo with dry organic material to balance moisture and to prevent insect interest. The organic cover material also prevents odors. I know it is hard to believe, but you could stand next to our tank and either smell nothing or a slight smell of damp sawdust on humid days. We had very few problems with odors or insects…much less than the typical pit latrine (and we now have plenty of pit latrine experience for comparing).


After a couple of months, we started asking at the store where we’d bought the barrel about getting a second, with the idea that when the first filled, we’d swap the lid/seat, cap the full one and let it sit for six months or so in the sun to compost and kill all the bad stuff.

But even after trying all over town for 3 months, we had no luck tracking down a second barrel with a lid like the first to fit our system. We finally decided we need another solution, so we did some more research, read some more in The Humanure Handbook about what it takes to make it safe, and decided to use our tank’s contents in a bocachi compost pile. Bocachi is actually a Japanese term for a fast compost process (typically resulting in usable compost in 3-4 weeks vs the 12-20 weeks of a normal compost pile) that generates some high heat almost immediately. Amongst the recipes are several that use estericol (manure), typically from cow, horse, or chicken, but we figured (based on nutrient levels) we could use ours too.

So we set about collecting the other ingredients (measuring in gallons because 5-gallon buckets are used for everything here and thus form a basic measurement unit in the field):
· already had the sawdust and estericol mixed together (we estimate a mix of 1/3 poo and 2/3 sawdust in our tank), about 40-45 gallons;
· banana tree (chopped), about 10 gallons;
· dirt (for the microorganisms), about 5-8 gallons;
· ash and charcoal (slightly larger, not fully burned to ash), about 5-10 gallons;
· yeast (to actively grow), about three-quarters of a pound;
· a molasses-type mixture made from raspadura, which is sugar-cane pucks, about 5 gallons;
· and balo leaves, balo being a tree that is commonly used for fences here in Panama because when a branch is cut off, it can be stuck an inch in the ground and it will grow. Balo is also a plant that is known for having insect repellent properties and it fixes nitrogen and its leaves are very high in nitrogen which is good for compost piles (the sacks of leaves we collected were very warm to the touch within a day). My guesstimate for collection of enough balo was that I could do it in one morning; it took two days, with April helping the second day. We collected an estimated 120 lbs. of balo leaves.

We also collected, with permission of the owner, some left-over side boards from when folks cut down teak trees and chainsawed them into boards. We used these, along with screen material, nails and wire, to build a “box” for our pile, which according to the “special fast bocachi” directions, needed to be 8-inches off the ground to get proper air circulation for heating up. Air circulation is important because the microorganisms we wish to encourage are aerobic…they use oxygen. There are also anaerobic (without oxygen) microorganisms that compost, you can tell the difference between the two because anaerobic microorganisms release an ammonia smell. Aerobic (oxygen users) microorganisms are preferred…thus most compost is turned occasionally to admit oxygen and stored in ways that allows airflow.

To further ensure proper circulation throughout the pile (which is to be 3-feet square and 4-feet tall), April drilled holes in 1” PVC tubing we had left over from construction and we placed these in the middle as we filled the box.

Finally we had everything ready and “rolled out the barrel” to begin the mixing process. We shoveled out the sawdust/poo mixture.

As you can see, it just looked like sawdust and there was no smell beyond a faint earthy sawdust-y odor. Other than the top (most recent) layer, everything we encountered was sawdust or dried hard (think a cow patty on the Great Plains). (For the most part, we did like most places with flush toilets here in Panama and bagged then burned our TP; there was a week or two when we put the TP in the tank, but we never found that layer when emptying the tank. It had totally composted and disappeared; it looked like nothing other than sawdust.)

As I shoveled in the sawdust and carefully broke up the few lumps, April added the other ingredients.

We shoveled, stirred, and added some water to get the proper consistency (the directions said to grab a handful and see if it clumped right, but I think they were working with other types of estericol. We gauged by eye, based on lots of past composting experience not clump.) It was a large pile. Too large, we wondered?

Then we began to shovel into the box, with April holding the PVC tubes upright. It fit perfectly.

The next morning, April put her hand over the top of the tubes, to see if it was heating up like promised. A definite hot breeze of air was coming out of the tubes.

They say it will be ready in about three weeks, but we’ll give it a bit longer just to be safe. Research on common human pathogens indicates that we need about a 14 days (week then turn and a week more) at our compost pile’s normal temperature to kill the bad stuff. If you have doubts about this please refer to chapter 7 of the Humanure Handbook available at: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/downloads/PDF_all%20chapters/Chapter_7.pdf
After it is done we plan to dig a garden bed, pour it in, cover with a thick layer of dirt, plant some seeds, and a while later, hopefully enjoy the best, biggest, tomatoes ever. Other volunteers who have done composting toilets report that tomatoes love the finished compost and we love tomatoes.

If you are interested in knowing more about using human waste in compost please check out the Humanuare Handbook by Joseph Jenkins which is available online for free at: http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html yes, you can buy one...but scroll down and you find editions available for download for free. Great book...I think you can look forward to composting toilets at the Cropper house in the States in future years. (I hope that won´t keep you from visiting!)