God I love growing our own

[Goran]

Yesterday.. hailstorm.. nothing to say.. " The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.." I must be a great sinner..

 

[MillMeadow]

Yesterday.. hailstorm.. nothing to say.. " The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.." I must be a great sinner..

I'm sure you're not Goran. It rains on the just and unjust alike.

 

[enrico]

Yesterday.. hailstorm.. nothing to say.. " The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.." I must be a great sinner..

It's heartbreaking when all your hard work is wrecked so quickly. They will hopefully recover To some extent

 

[pargyle]

Yesterday.. hailstorm.. nothing to say.. " The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.." I must be a great sinner..

That's really sad Goran ... you don't expect hail at this time of the year where you are .. hopefully the plants will recover to some extent.

 

[Goran]

We will see.. Though they say it just has started, and we should get used to it as new normal.. Some places even got much worse of it - roof tiles were broken as they were bombarded, etc. They show it - size of tennis balls.. Also they say storks refused to leave nests and young ones and were killed in their nests.. That is some horror show..

 

[pargyle]

Been tieing up and pinching out my cordon tomatoes, they really seem to have taken off -quite a few clutches of flowers on all of them now ... I just love the smell of tomato plants.
My blackcurrants are near ripe ... I suspect the birds will be watching as well. The smell of blackcurrant bushes is another delight in the allotment. No rain down here so I was watering the raised beds and pots - they were looking very dry.

 

[JamezF]

I love the smell of blackcurrants. I'm having a couple of days break from the veggie plot though, having spent most of last week weeding. Again. The weeds have been absolutely rampant this year and I really wanted to get rid of as many as possible before they started setting seed.

We've also found that we have new pests in the plot this year. As well as deer, pigeons and pheasants over the last few days we've started to find rabbits invading. I've not seen any rabbits around here for years and had assumed the cats were keeping the numbers down, but perhaps now they're getting older the pest control isn't quite up to snuff, though in fairness my wife did find one of them breakfasting on a small rabbit in the polytunnel this morning.

I'm making further progress on the compost toilet too, now I have it in what will almost certainly be its final resting place, given that it's been so awkward to move. I pinched some scrap timber from work and have built the main part of the "throne". Hopefully I have enough left over for a door on the front and then I need to buy (the horror!) a seat so I can decide the correct position and size for the hole above the bucket.

James

 

[Garry R]

My late Dad owned a factory in 1952 in Dublin which made beautiful mahogany lavatory seats. Unfortunately it was just at the point in history when the world moved to making plastic seats and as they were so cheap the business had to close. Dad then made his living turning wooden bowls which ended up for sale in a large department store in Dublin, He often described the lavatory seat period as the bottom dropping out of the market!

 

[JamezF]

Little bits of tidying up to do here and there, but functionally my new compost source is now complete:

James

 

[Garry R]

Presumably the grand opening will be a ceremonial ripping of the toilet roll.

 

[JamezF]

Presumably the grand opening will be a ceremonial ripping of the toilet roll.

It would be most appropriate

James

 

[Garry R]

Being an outside lavvy it would have to be Izal or Bronco?

 

[JamezF]

Being an outside lavvy it would have to be Izal or Bronco?

I'm not quite that much of a masochist

James

 

[pargyle]

Two questions ...

1. I assume the urine is collected elsewhere for ageing and then used as fertiliser ? If not then a urinal connected to a 50 litre container might be an enhancement you could consider. It needs to be aged by leaving it for 6 months before dilution and use so two or three rotating 50 litre containers may be needed.

https://www.growveg.co.uk/guides/pee-cycling-for-gardeners/

2. What medium are you using for covering the contents ?

I have a friend with a composting toilet on his live-aboard narrow boat and I had a lengthy discussion with him about this gross subject when I spent a few days helping him move the boat from Oxford down to Reading. He found that a mix of sawdust (pure wood sawdust - avoid anything faced with melamine) mixed with coir (very dark material so aids the aesthetics when you lift the lid) and small quantities of wood ash from his wood burner made a very quick usable and fertile compost. Wood flakes did not work very well and shredded newspaper was a disaster.

He also had a small container of diatomaceous earth as one of the problems is that small flies (not blue bottles etc. - these are tiny ones like fruit flies) tended to take up residence in the toilet and a sprinkling of DE sorted them out and did not affect the final chemical composition. His toilet was one with a urine separator - he found it worked better than his Mark 1 version which he said became very wet and smelly.

What are your plans for emptying the container ?

Hope you are not sitting eating your tea and reading this but it's an interesting subject and whilst, at present, my plot is not big enough to consider a garden toilet (apart from a pee bale behind the workshop) our future plans, when we get round to moving house, may well be an opportunity.

 

[JamezF]

1. Everything goes in the same bucket. At least until I see for myself how well it works, I'm following the guidelines set out in Joseph Jenkins' "The Humanure Handbook" on the grounds that he claims to have used such arrangements even indoors and they don't smell. I'm sceptical, but willing to put it to the test given that mine is a short walk from the house.

2. I'm using sawdust as a cover medium (again suggested by the above book). I've been collecting it from the workshop for some time, but now also have access to a fair amount from work. And if I should ever run out of that, there's a sawmill a couple of miles away where I can get more.

A friend locally has been using pretty much the same setup for a couple of years, but separates "liquids" from "solids" and says that it works well as long as the sawdust is damp. I'm guessing that if no separation is being done then the "dampness" happens naturally.

James

 

[enrico]

Any liquid would be good on my garden, desperate for rain here on the levels. Hopefully it should be raining tonight.

 

[pargyle]

1. Everything goes in the same bucket. At least until I see for myself how well it works, I'm following the guidelines set out in Joseph Jenkins' "The Humanure Handbook" on the grounds that he claims to have used such arrangements even indoors and they don't smell. I'm sceptical, but willing to put it to the test given that mine is a short walk from the house.

2. I'm using sawdust as a cover medium (again suggested by the above book). I've been collecting it from the workshop for some time, but now also have access to a fair amount from work. And if I should ever run out of that, there's a sawmill a couple of miles away where I can get more.

A friend locally has been using pretty much the same setup for a couple of years, but separates "liquids" from "solids" and says that it works well as long as the sawdust is damp. I'm guessing that if no separation is being done then the "dampness" happens naturally.

James

Keep us in the loop then ! Good luck with it.

My grandfather was a midden emptier for the local council in Yorkshire before the first world war. In those days the toilet was usually at the bottom of the garden - backing onto a wall in the alley behind. Before water closets they were basically what you have - a hole in the ground rather than a bucket. The normal 'medium' was the ash from the coal fires. The midden emptier (in Grandad's case) with a horse and cart and at night would go down the back alleys and there was a trap in the back wall of the 'privy' and the contents would be shovelled into the back of the cart ...

Nothing much has changed in 110 years in my case !

 

[Midget Gem]

New batch ( our apples)

Looks delicious. Would you be prepared to share the recipe, please

 

[CLB]

Anyone else having similar trouble to us with runner beans this year? A couple of weeks ago they were literally covered with open flowers, however almost everyone fell off unfertilised. The same thing has just happened again. The upper parts of the plants were covered in flowers and after the deluges we’ve had in the last few days there are no flowers left. It’s not been like this in 25 years. I have never seen so few bees (honey or bumble) in our garden. Does anyone else think that bee numbers might be much lower this year?

Carol

 

[fian]

Some photos of the garden.