Composting toilets

We compost all our waste. At it's most complex a composting toilet can be an edifice with seperate chambers for composting in situ with fans and so on but at it's most simple it's a comfortable plastic bucket, sawdust and a compost heap (Ventilated with a layer of brush to allow it to get hot enough to kill anything nasty) We feed the result to our trees as it may be unsafe to use it directly on crops but the cycle is closed. The ashes from the chestnut we burn in winter ends up on the vegetable beds, we eat the vegetables and feed our composted waste to the chestnut.

Coppicing extends the life of trees. The oldest coppices here are over 1600 years old. You can tell how old a coppice is by the diameter of the ring the tree forms. Some of ours are 15-20 feet across. They used to power brick kilns made from the clay here hence the name Brickhurst.

One of the things I would like to do with the beds is to incorporate charcoal as it acts as a massive surface area for microorganisms and helps create soil but you need to do it during a fallow year as it sucks nitrogen out of the soil at first. Could be ok for an annual medicinal herb crop during that year. We're also going to be using mycorrhizal fungi all over the place.

If I can find the money I'll get some rock dust and remineralise all the beds too. Rock dust +  mycorrhizal fungi = astonishing effects.


The fungi feed the plants minerals from the rock dust and the plants feed the fungi sugars and the result is extra large veg.


If you can't afford the fungi incorporate some woodland soil in your beds. Just a little should do it.