there is a subtler need. Parks, street trees, and manicured lawns do very little to establish the connection between us and the land. They teach us nothing of its productivity, nothing of its capacities. Many people who are born, raised, and live out their lives in cities simply do not know where the food they eat comes from or what a living garden is like. Their only connection with the productivity of the land comes from packaged tomatoes on the supermarket shelf. But contact with the land and its growing process is not simply a quaint nicety from the past that we can let go of casually. More likely, it is a basic part of the process of organic security. Deep down, there must be some sense of insecurity in city dwellers who depend entirely upon the supermarkets for their produce.
Community gardens needn’t be expensive propositions either. When Santa Barbara residents decided to start a downtown garden back in May, 1970, they used their ingenuity. A vacant downtown lot was acquired (at a cost of one dollar for 6 months), and the city provided free water and a tractor with operator for two days. Compost was no problem. The group got leaves from the park department, hard sludge from the local sanitation district, and horse manure from a nearby riding club. Tools and seeds were donated. (“Community Gardens,” Bob Rodale, San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 1972, p. 16.)
School garden in Amsterdam, worked by the children. Therefore:
Set aside one piece of land either in the private garden or on common land as a vegetable garden. About one-tenth of
820
177 VEGETABLE GARDEN
an acre is needed for each family of four. Make sure the vegetable garden is in a sunny place and central to all the households it serves. Fence it in and build a small storage shed for gardening tools beside it.
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| a/4o acre per person |
To fertilize the vegetables, use the natural compost which is generated by the house and the neighborhood—compost (178); and if possible, try to use water from the sinks and drains to irrigate the soil—bathing room (144). . . .
178 COMPOST*
In Chekiang Province, as in many other parts of China, roadside toilets abound. They are built by faimers to entice passersby into favoring them with a gift of valued fertilizer.
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. . . the garden is a valuable part of the house, because it can help you grow fruit and vegetables—fruit trees (170), vegetable garden (177). But it can only flourish if it gets nourishment j and this nourishment, in the form of compost, can only be created when the garbage and the wastes from the individual houses and house clusters (37) and from the animals (74) are properly organized.
♦J*
Our current ways of getting rid of sewage poison the great bodies of natural water, and rob the land around our buildings of the nutrients they need.
To the average individual in the city, it probably appears that the sewage system works beautifully—no muss, no fuss. Just pull the toilet chain, and everything is fine. In fact, city dwellers who have had the experience of using a smelly outhouse would probably argue that our modern system of sewage disposal is a tremendous advance over earlier practices. Unfortunately, this is simply not the case. Almost every step in modern sewage disposal is either wasteful, expensive, or dangerous.
We can start by remembering that every single time a toilet is flushed, seven gallons of drinking water go down the drain. In fact, around half of our domestic water consumption goes to flushing out the toilet.
Beyond the cost of the water, there is an enormous cost in the hardware of the sewer system. The average new homeowner today, living on a 50 x 150 foot lot in the city, has paid $1500 as his share of the collection system which takes sewage from his house to the sewage treatment plant. In lower density residential areas, this cost may be $2000 or even $6000. Each house pays an additional $500 toward the cost of the sewage treatment plant. We see then that the initial cost of today’s sewage system is at least $2000 per house, often more. And these prices do not include monthly service charges for water and sewer facilities: around $50 per year for a single family household.
BUILDINGS
In addition we must add those costs which are less easily measurable in dollars and cents, but which may, in the long run, prove even higher than those already discussed. These include: (i) the value of lost nutrients which are allowed to flow away into the rivers and oceans—nutrients which could have been used to build up the soil they came from; and (2) the cost of the pollution: effluents cause “eutrophication”—the
sewage depletes the oxygen in water and causes it to become clogged with algae.
What can be done? Some of this effluent might be recycled back to the land in the form of sludge. But residential sewage is usually mixed with industrial waste which often contains extremely noxious elements. And even if industrial wastes were not allowed into the sewage system, an additional distribution system would be needed to get the sludge back to the land. We see, therefore, that additional costs required to make the existing system ecologically sound are prohibitive.
What is needed is not a larger, more centralized and complex system, but a smaller, more decentralized and simpler one. We need a system that is less expensive; and we need a system that is an ecological benefit rather than an ecological drain.
We propose that individual small-scale composting plants begin to replace our present, disposal system. Small buildings would be equipped with their own miniature sewage plants, located directly under the toilets. All bulky garbage produced on-site would be added to the plants. The resultant humus would be used to replenish the soil surrounding the building and throughout the neighborhood, as would the waste water from bathing and washing.
Such miniature sewage plants are commercially available and are currently in use in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. They are sold under the trade names Multrum or Clivus, and they can even be imported to the United States for a total price of $1500: much lower than the lowest figure of $2000, currently being charged for the conventional system. For a worked example, see Van der Ryn, Anderson and Sawyer, “Composting Privy”, Technical Bulletin ^£1, Natural Energy Design Center, University of California, Berkeley, Dept, of Architecture, January 1974*
| T 'WT- |
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| Clivus compost chamber. |
These composting plants are so simple that they can be built by amateurs for much less money. An extremely simple homemade composting system is described below:
The privy is built adjoining a larger outbuilding which is built over a root cellar. From overhead joists to floor, the cellar is about Y deep. And so it was simplest to make the composting chamber beneath the privy Y deep. . . .
In the composting chamber underneath our privy, we have been using peat-moss—both because it is highly absorbent, and because it comes compactly baled and is convenient to store. We also use some garden dirt and a little lime.