Does The Composting Head Work?

For the faint of heart and/or those not interested in the scatalogical goings on within Selkie, now is the time to turn and run.

For those that do care (you bunch of sickos), here’s the update on the composting head after three months of use. We love it and are completely happy with our decision to remove the Jabsco marine head and switch to a Nature’s Head composting system. Now, that’s not to say that it functioned flawlessly, but we’re pretty sure that the minor issues we had were due to user error.

It should be noted here that there are no pumpout stations in the Sea of Cortez that we’re aware of, so pumping out was not an option.

We had been living on the boat and using the head for about eight weeks before we emptied it the first time. It became slightly malodorous after about six weeks, and we should have either emptied it then or added more coir, which is the coconut husk product that is used as the carbon source. Our assumption is that the carbon to nitrogen ratio became too hot after this time, and the proper composting environment ceased to exist: hence the smell.

After the first empty, we added moist coir to the empty bowl, but after only a week, it smelled again. We added more coir, this time dry, presuming the environment was a bit too wet and therefore anaerobic, and since then it has been completely odor free.

As we knew from the beginning, it has been a bit of trial and error figuring out just the right amount of coir, and just the right amount of moisture, but we’re okay with that. We were able to dump beautiful compost under a tree in the desert, creating a microsite of healthy, rich soil, instead of dumping raw sewage into the sheltered bays where we swim and harvest fish.

In the end, it turns out that our shit do stink, but only for a while, and we can fix it.

p.s. While we walked up the (seemingly) remote arroyo to dump our well, dump, we happened across another composting head dump site, that only another composting head user themselves would have been able to recognize. Totally innocuous, odor free soil that was feeding a big Baja California Elephant Tree. Perhaps that tree can thank a certain Steve and Lulu??