Lina Zeldovich: The power of shit
Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand, sometimes he balanced them on a koromyslo – an arched wooden pole placed over the shoulders to distribute weight evenly.
He poked small holes in the tomato patches where the dried-up plants carried no fruit that sewage could contaminate – and poured the goo into them, covering the holes with soil. He splashed some around the roots of the apple and cherry trees and raked some leaves over so that, when we walked around, we wouldn’t get any on the soles of our feet. And he also dumped a bunch into one of the compost pits, adding it to the heap of other organic refuse. The compost pits were where Mother Nature forged its black gold. And there was a system to it, too.
The three composting pits operated on a rotating schedule. Throughout the growing season, the current pit would accumulate all the organic refuse we had – wilted flowers, pulled weeds, shrivelled stems of cucumber vines. In went our kitchen scraps too, like potato peels and mouldy bread. At the end of the season, he’d mix in the sludge and close the pit for a couple of years, leaving it to decompose and degrade.
When he opened it two years later in the spring, all the dead and
stinky stuff was gone. The pit was full of soft, rich and fertile dirt that
smelled of nature, spring and the promise of the next harvest. That freshly
made soil was fluffy and weightless like sugar powder, except it was black. The
plants’ roots loved it and so did I. It felt so good to hold that soft soil in
my palms – and transfer the tiny green tomato shoots into it. I could already
smell their faint fragrance that would soon fully blossom into the crimson red
fruit bursting with sweetness.
‘You have to feed the
earth the way you feed people,’ my grandfather used to say. ..
https://aeon.co/essays/a-short-biography-of-human-excrement-and-its-value
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