Seaweed Emulsion

Seaweed along with a good nitrogen supply can deliver everything a plant may want: up to 60 trace elements, natural growth hormones, natural disease control and a great food for beneficial fungi. Strong stuff!
Making the emulsion is simple.

First rinse the seaweed (or let it sit out in a couple of tropical storms!), to leach out salt and sand. Chop enough to fill a bucket then add water – rainwater is best. Adding molasses will speed up the process, a ½ cup will do. Let the bucket sit covered for a week stirring every day to aerate. When a foamy, filmy, yeasty surface develops the emulsion is ready. The emulsion is best diluted, 1 part emulsion to up to 5 parts water. Use as a ground soak or as a foliar spray.

nitrogen fix

Just finished my nitrogen delivery.

When I lived in my cob house I had a composting toilet, basically a bucket and a big bag of sawdust. It worked beautifully. I haven’t tried it here, though think about it often; I know several people with pit toilets, but as yet haven’t quite finished the loop on that one. And it is a loop: I really think it all started going downhill when mankind stopped dealing with its solid waste. To remove what every other living thing contributes to the soil and plants which feed us, and instead to dump it, treated or not, into our water takes us so far out of the natural order, sets us apart in such unhealthy ways. Yes, I could go on. In cultures where the loop is complete and waste is returned consciously to the land – well let’s just say the vegetables grow bigger. We have a septic system here with a leach field so somehow something is returned, but not much.

I don’t eat meat or fish and I eat from the garden mostly with grains and legumes added. I don’t take medication of any sort and I’m not a drinker, so what I could ‘contribute’, is certainly compostable. Maybe that’s the project for my upcoming 3 weeks off school. I already have an outdoor bathroom, it’s not such a stretch.

Unless there’s a guest, no one pees in the toilet. The boys just wander off for a moment in the garden, I on the other hand have a series of rotating buckets. Just before dusk the bucket’s contents are diluted with an equal amount of rainwater and fed to the plants in rotation. The nitrogen, potassium, calcium and trace minerals, the trace garlic, ginger, chili and whatever else is present directly benefit the plant and I feel good about contributing, and saving the water that would be wasted in flushing. The only thing I’m careful of is not splashing leaves or stems, if it’s too strong it can cause burns under sunlight. The buckets get a vinegar rinse and are left to bleach out in the sun: sunlight is an excellent bleach.
The average household flushes the toilet 14 times a day and the average flush takes 11 litres of water. That’s a lot of water. I keep hearing how the next oil crisis will be a water crisis, let’s start saving now and helping out our plants at the same time!!

While I’m about it, we also compost all our toilet paper, just add it to the compost pile along with everything else. We use unbleached, biodegradable, recycled paper, goes right in, perfectly simple, completes another part of the loop. Why flush it, what a waste of carbon. Offset your carbon footprint – compost your toilet paper!!!!!!!!

In many cultures – Costa Rica included – people don’t flush paper, instead there is a little bin or bucket beside the toilet into which all the paper goes. When it’s full some people burn it (I guess that’s not so bad if you put the ash in the compost), most others bag it and it goes to the land fill (is that carbon sequestered?). If the bin is emptied regularly there’s no smell, and really there’s no mess (fluids evaporate quickly even in this humid climate). It makes perfect sense to compost it. Try it for a week. Be part of the cycle.

making beds

The soil here is thick clay, it needs to be seriously amended before I can use it. So I don’t use it, I make raised beds instead, trusting that by the time the plant’s roots are long enough to touch clay the plant will be strong and healthy enough to penetrate and draw strength from this heavy stuff. The beds are based on the permaculture / hegelculture / bleedingly obvious method.
- First a loose layer of broken up sticks which help with drainage and provide a nice habitat for beneficial microbes,
- A layer of cardboard and paper to help encourage worms and provide food – also good here as we can’t recycle paper,
- A good thick layer of dead leaves for nutrients and to attract worms,
- A layer of toilet paper (in Costa Rica we don’t flush paper and it’s better here than in a landfill or burned, plus it’s good for composting, and it’s most certainly a renewable resource),
- Another layer of leaves – both dried and green cuttings and prunings,
- A top layer of kitchen compost mixed with new soil from rotting logs.
The whole thing is edged with rotting logs (the best), coconut husks or stones. I’m also playing with planting a pumpkin in each and training the vine around the outside of the bed – giving shade and later mulch, and of course food. Beds are always mulched with a layer of dead leaves (I have lots of dead leaves), but cardboard, paper, sawdust work just as well (pine and softwood sawdust will make your soil acidic). The mulch keeps in the moisture and provides nutrients as it breaks down. Here it also offers some protection from the dreaded leaf cutter ants. I think slugs too maybe. I’d like to add wood ash, but haven’t been able to keep wood dry enough to burn.