Day soil, night soil, caveat lector

Friends, it pains me to say this, but maintaining a working composting dog toilet is not as simple as I thought. You may remember my celebration of its installation in the second half of this long entry. So far as I can tell, there are problems with what I will tactfully call pace and volume. I am still thinking about how to resolve this. While I am sure you are all of strong stomachs, those of you for whom this discussion is already sufficiently detailed may not wish to read beyond the cut below.

The system is straightfoward enough: shovel dog waste into a water-filled bucket that is buried in about three-quarters of a metre of large gravelly fill. Above the first bucket sits a second, bottomless bucket with generous drainage slots in its sides, about thirty centimetres underground. An activating ingredient is added to the lower bucket which rapidly decomposes the waste into a largely odourless sludge. When the lower bucket is full, twenty litres of water poured into the unit will liquefy the sludge and flush it out into the subsoil, via the drainage slots and the gravelly fill.

Here are the factors that are impeding its usage out the back of my humble home. A certain amount of time needs to pass between adding fresh waste, composting old waste and flushing a full bucket. Even though my dogs are not particularly high volume converters of food into waste, the fact that there’s five of them means the unit never gets a break. It fills up very rapidly, without being ready to flush. When it’s overfull, it doesn’t flush effectively: the flushable sludge blocks the drainage slots. At least it doesn’t smell. One solution would be to install a second unit next to the first, but the labour and cost involved has put me off that for the winter: accounting for the unit, the gravel and the labour, it is about two hundred dollars’ worth of work. There’s also the fact that the current unit is overshadowed on one side by the five-foot high mountain of soil excavated with the original installation. There is nowhere to put another dirt mountain.

The second problem is the things that don’t break down in the unit. It is hard to believe the volume of slow- or non-degrading materials my doggies eat. Foam rubber is one; it is remarkable what can be nibbled out from the interior of a couch without anyone really noticing. Edwin and Fern are the chief culprits in this, occasionally assisted by Evie. Another is dog hair. All five are known to be coat chewers from time to time, but again it is Edwin who is the real agent of gathering this material. Most days he works a circuit around the house, licking the edge of carpets and the corners of rooms. This is by no means uncommon in Norwich Terriers, but leads to waste production that looks more like skeins of yarn than what might be expected from a dog’s gut. A third is plastic fragments. Millie and Evie don’t so much play with toys as eat them, over time. All this part-time nibbling leads to further materials to block the drainage slots and form a floating, multicoloured reef on the surface of what should be an earthy pile of anonymity. I have to skim this reef off regularly.

Nonetheless I am still committed to this new system, even though it doesn’t work properly. At the moment I am trying to rest the disposal unit itself, by using a second above-ground sealed bucket that makes the composting a two-step process. This is working, sort of. Drainage in the original unit has also been impeded by gravel falling into the lower unit (from that top layer of pea gravel which I thought looked so smart initially), which effectively raises the level and reduces its capacity. However, I haven’t yet reduced the waste in it sufficiently to shovel out the gravel.

Had I time, fine weather and upper body strength, I think the system would be more effective reinstalled as a three-level, multi-bucket process. A first buried bucket could be the original waste receptacle. A hole and chute at the corner of its base could deliver the waste, gradually, to a second bucket, buried lower, in which composting could take place. This could then move by super-slow chute conveyance to the third bucket with drainage slots, to which water at very low pressure could be fed by hose for say two hours a day. I think this would work, but this is not the time of year for the señor, the elderly harvestparents and I to be digging deep in cold ground. Perhaps when the señor and I go ahead with our house extension next year, we could design a custom system for immediately outside the dedicated dog room on which I fear the majority of our money will be spent.

When first I wrote about my waste composting dreams it was under the broader theme of 無. Pace Stephen, it seems that going from poo to mu is far more difficult than I first anticipated. But I will have my nothing yet, my absence of waste, my return of the consumed to the earth. To think that I once quit composting food scraps and garden waste because of the hassle of it; our reinstated bin of rotting coffee grounds, tea leaves and greens seems like the simplest of all structures now.

Tagged as: composting toilet for dogs, poo, 無