Extreme Composting: Outhouse Bananas Edition!

Rosita Alonzo comments on my terra preta video:

“I HAD TO TELL YOU THIS: my grandpa was a Rural School teacher. He was born in 1897 in Paraguay from a Sicilian Turkish family that emigrated to South America.

We always had an orchard and vegetable garden and a little field for yuca, sweet potatoes, corn, watermelons, melons and squashes, so we rarely bought vegetables or eggs and chickens.

In those times we had “latrines” and quite far from the main house, so always every child had a “basin” or container to use with cover to use in case of need.

For me this was normal, since no child will go in the middle on night 100 to 300 ft away in the dark night or rain to the bathroom, but those latrines fill quite fast, lasting 3-5 years, maybe less, depending on depth. (Then) we made a new one, and we filled the old one with soil and yard debris until it look like a little mountain. When we’d go again to check, there would be a depression and we would refill it from the chicken coop, cow manure, and we’d clean the yard and fill the hole and again we’d create a little mountain with soil on top.

When we went to check again and it was level (these holes were easily 6ft x 6ft), then grandpa would say it was ready to put the banana plants there. Those bananas had flowers and little bananas (all the way to the) ground, grandpa said!

Bananas only fill the flowers if the soil is super rich; poor soil produces short rows of bananas. These bananas were the amazement of the neighborhood, but grandpa never told them they were planted over our former latrines!

Every banana cluster was planted on former latrines, so far as I know, because my grandpa believed they would produce the best bananas and we did not have but about 2-3 acres only of available land.”

What a beautiful story.

We serve an amazing God, who can even use the vilest of things to bring fruit. We spent multiple years using composting toilet systems, and we lived. And grew plenty of crops with our so-called “waste.” The best-looking bananas I ever saw were growing next to a leaking septic tank!

The entire system of nature was designed as a recycling machine, turning old into new, again and again.

When people were getting nervous about fertilizer shortages, I shook my head. Sure, bagged fertilizer is convenient, but for almost all of recorded history mankind grew food just fine without chemical help.

You can literally poop in a hole and grow food on top of it. And all the weeds can be made into compost teas. And seaweed washes up every day. And cows are compost-making machines.

Fertilizer is abundant. It’s our thinking that is deficient.

Compost Everything!

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