Just think of the traditional cottage garden...snow hope wrote:Am I the only one that finds this disgusting? I am sorry but I just can't buy into human manure...... I must be too much of a Nancy!
http://journeytoforever.org/compost_humanure.html
In 1859 the Rev Henry Moule of Dorset in England decided the family cess-pit was a foul abomination, had it filled in, and told his family to use buckets, the contents to be emptied and buried in trenches in the garden -- where, within weeks, "not a trace of it could be discovered". What could soon be discovered was a "luxuriant growth of vegetables in my garden" -- and that dry surface earth, not water, was the place for "offensive matters". He wrote a pamphlet on it: "National health and wealth, instead of the disease, nuisance, expense, and waste, caused by cess-pools and water-drainage", and became a tireless campaigner for his by-now patented Moule Earth Closet (No 1316, 1860) -- wondrous Victorian-style machines which "flushed" dry earth via a lever, or automatically when you stood up, with luxury models in mahogany and oak. The soil could be dried and re-used up to seven times without offence or nuisance. It was a powerful fertilizer: a neighbouring farmer's swedes grew a third bigger when he used it instead of superphosphates. "Manure for the millions," Moule wrote in a letter to the cottage gardeners of England. Schools used them, and barracks, The Lancet wrote of them glowingly, even Queen Victoria had an earth closet (though of course she never had to use it...). But in the end the sheer mindless convenience of the water closet (flush toilet) won the battle -- though perhaps not yet the war.
