Chris Waldon

Another design question:
For this type of setup, is it prudent to install some sort of vapor barrier on the bottom side of the boards that make the "box" the seats rest on? Or some sort of sealant?
Is the whole pooper bare wood, interior and exterior?

My thinking is that odors and moisture evaporating off the depository will affix to and penetrate the wood. How is this mitigated?

Paul Wheaton wrote:Some people kept opening the back wheelie bin access - thus making it so the system could not pull.

This answered my question

Shark week?
...

oh. ok then. That did take me a few seconds.
I like the design of the walls and use of lightweight cedar fence boards, very cheap by the square foot, even better if they're reclaimed from somebody's old fence. An outswing door is the way to go. Were galvanized hinges used? I expect there's enough airflow going through the pooper that condensation build up on the bottom of the metal roof hasn't been a problem.

Wyatt Barnes wrote:Very pretty but in my opinion two seats is one too many.

My question for anybody who knows: Does this pooper use a removable bin system? Or is it over a hole? If the former, I can see two seats as being advantageous for servicing. One bucket could be removed for 'processing' while the other is still available for use. If you're not sure which one is good to go, just remember to look before you lean.
By the way, if you're looking for a nickname for the pooper that's a little more, um, nonchalant, may I suggest calling it the Roman House. That way if two people are so bold as to use it as the same time, they could say it's a throwback to Roman times and communal toilets.

Perhaps leave a deck of cards in the Roman House as well. A game of gin with a friend can help pass the time. Not unlike the boys in All Quiet on the Western Front.

This is a true story. It was told to me by my great uncle who lives on a small rural farm in Twisp, WA.

This may belong in the 'meaningless drivel' forum, but there is a lesson to be learned regarding raising chickens, so here goes:

On yet another frosty winter morning at the cabin in Twisp, my uncle goes outside to feed and check on his modest flock. The ground is crunchy and frozen over in places. He's used to it. The flock is used to it, except for one poor hen. He finds her laying dead not far from the coop. He looks her over and can only figure that she wasn't cut for this kind of climate. After two decades of experience, he has a couple rules for his chickens: he doesn't cannibalize them, and he only eats what he kills himself. He thinks he should bury this one to keep it away from the carrion-eaters of the larger variety. But the ground is frozen over and that's a lot of work.

He reluctantly decides to chuck the chook in the creek. The back of his cabin sits against the Methow River that runs through the valley.

To clear the rock embankment and land it in the river, my uncle has to grab the chicken by the legs and underhand toss it with enough force to get the distance.

What he finds out two seconds after that is ice cold water can wake up an unconscious bird pretty quick.

The last thing my uncle sees of his dead chicken is its head popping up out of the water, looking around, wide-eyed, and probably wondering why all the land is moving by so quickly. The two of them are utterly stunned. One more so than the other.










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Lesson to learn: If you're not sure if the chicken is dead, a small bucket of ice water will tell you.

Vera Stewart wrote:
Actually, I plan on re-reading The Poisonwood Bible, since I suspect I've matured a little bit in my thinking since the first time. But maybe I haven't.

This is something I've wondered myself regarding The Poisonwood Bible. It was assigned reading in English class my senior year 13 years ago. Back then I had an over developed antipathy for the books we were made to read. I judged Kingsolver as being too high on herself to be taken seriously. I think it was the character who only spoke in palindromes. "This author's A showoff," I thought. But since Vera brought it up, I recall an early section of the book where the locals were trying to convince the missionary father to read the landscape and plant his crop accordingly. He would have none of it and insisted on his perfectly straight, ground level annuals that ended up getting washed out when the rains came. This book is probably worth another look.

What I'd most likely give a second reading though, just in case some maturing has allowed me to understand it better, is Thoreau's Walden.

I have a client who owns a white PVC lattice fence. Cleaning it every year is not that big of a deal, they just bust out the pressure washer and *whoosh* it's done. But what is the first thing to dirty up their clean, pretty fence?Slugs. Or more specifically, slug leavings. Little coiled wormy looking slug poop stuck to the side of the white vinyl. Looks like a shoe lace to a GI Joe action figure.Their slugs are everywhere. Moving, feeding, breeding, doing what they do, but never without making their presence known.

The client has tried the beer traps, but has resorted to circling their garden area with the powdered slug bait.

But it's in observing the poop laden white vinyl fence that I had an epiphany...(that's not weird, is it? Some of Man's best thinking happens in places where poop is involved anyway)

--Low friction surfaces are an attractant for slugs. paved Driveways, painted porches, white vinyl fences. There's no food for them there, but it gets them to the food on the other side much faster than having to navigate grass, mulch and soil.

I propose laying out a large sheet of plastic, tarp, even an old shower curtain. Use the beer trap in the middle of the sheet, maybe even cut a whole in the sheet and dig down a little bit so that the bowl holding the beer recipe (or other natural slug bait) sits more flush with the ground. Come morning, I expect the sheet would be full of slugs and the beer trap overflowing with drowned little slimees.

Release the Ducks! Breakfast!

What other ideas are out there in dealing with slugs? References to other slug control threads are welcome.

While digging a hole during a home-setting job in Moses Lake, WA, my boss pointed out to me the change in the dirt layer several inches down, less than a foot deep. The ash layer is still there, a 1" thick reminder that 35 years is a blip in the Earth's timetable.

Folks This Aint Normal and The Sheer Ecstasy of Being A Lunatic Farmer by Joel Salatin.

While both are easy going reads, I feel that Folks is more of a comprehensive, controlled diatribe of material Joel has already poured out or at least touched on in his previous books. I'm getting a lot of useful info out of Sheer Ecstasy as I learn more about this whole farming thing.

Here's one that really surprised me: Off On Our Own by Ted Carns. This one's about he and his wife's off grid lifestyle at the Stone Camp in Southwest Pennsylvania. Indeed, even as I type this up I googled the author and found the website for the book, thestonecamp.com. Now I need to take in that content. The author is a handyman at heart and goes into a lot of detail of the jobs, tasks, and innovations he's put into action at the camp, including wood gasifier tractors, total and complete recycling, and trash compacting cleaned junk plastics into bricks for framing an out building. He goes into a lot of philosophy behind his approach to self-sufficiency (note, he never says permaculture)

For fiction, I got a lot of entertainment out of Dan Simmons' Hyperion books, a 4 part sci-fi series.

This is a strategy that you probably already employ. When posting new content to Facebook, time it to post during the peak user traffic at permies.com. Many permies will catch it within a matter of minutes.

And thanks for my first apple on my previous post!

The first idea that jumped out at me on this topic is The Bricks!!! In the same way that Paul used his permaculture bricks to help fill out a deck of cards, the bricks can be used to inject content onto Facebook in a series of memes. The meme caters to the ADD mindset of the Facebook News Feed scroller (I'm not knocking ADD folk, but yall gotta admit the News Feed does foster a short attention span. Scroll, scroll, scroll) A simple picture with a short caption that conveys a bigger idea without dishing out a lot of information, just enough to get a click.

For example: A lovely picture of a pile of rocks in tall grass. The short caption can be something like "You see rocks, but we see natural garden slug control. Because permaculture"
or another: The illustration of the hugelkultur bed from Paul's article in all its lovely colors with the caption being "Grow all your vegetables without even turning on your hose. Because permaculture"

Why do I keep using, "because permaculture". Probably because it's become trendy to say because science! around the web. but anyways...these bricks won't be ads in the strictest sense, while they would advertise permaculture and what the page is about. If memes or similarly structured posts are catchy or funny or controversial they'll get shared quite often. This can drive new people to Paul's Facebook page.

Plan B is to have Paul take some selfies with duck lips in front of a mirror. That always seems to work.
Plan C is to pay Facebook. I don't much like Plan C.