Flushing the toilet
Currently from our garden, we are enjoying the most delightful watermelons and cucumbers, along with the more common garden vegetables we always grow, every year. Little gives us more satisfaction, than a salad prepared entirely from what we produce.
Richard Steele
Each and every year, I top up our gardens with dry sheep manure, from under the woolshed, where it’s spent a little time ageing.
Each and every year I’m amazed by the quality and taste of what our gardens produce, and the effortless manner in which the new earth turns manure into fine quality tucker.
So having an old but still enquiring mind, I wonder why we can’t ever seem to do better with our own manure.
Why on earth are we not using this resource as the asset it could so readily be. Surely just about anything has to be better than the current state of play, when every effluent treatment plant in the country, is either too small, too knackered, too old to be of any use, and all to expensive to replace.
Partially treat the sewerage, spread it on flat paddocks, and watch the grass grow.
Where there’s muck there’s grass
Get over any silly prejudices your mind has, we have been using birdshit on paddocks for hundreds of years. Where do you think super phosphate comes from?
On our first property, we had a source of chook manure and man did it make the land perform. We are still all healthy a hundred years later.
Think outside the square people, be like me, embarrassed, that on one hand we are so bloody clever, but on the other hand, so dumb, that in 2026, we aren’t clever enough, to stop ourselves from ruining the oceons that surround us.
Cities are the obvious problem, congregations of people in small areas, who have no option but to flush and forget.
Out of sight and out of mind.
Rather than look for a more pragmatic solution, the answer to which is staring us in the face. Use the stuff for the good that it can do, rather than come up with another impractical short term way of ignoring the elephant in the room.
We would save enough on our annual fertiliser imports to pay for my new scheme within a year, of it being implemented.
Flushing the toilet. Photo: Miriam Alonso, pexels.com
