Recycled

Permaculture is the use of ecology as the basis for designing integrated systems of food production and housing. It is built upon an ethnic of caring for the earth and interacting with the environment in mutually beneficial ways. Everything should be recycled so that nothing becomes trash. Trash is part of the cycle, and eventually becomes food or a usable raw material.

• Any vegetables not eaten should be fed to chickens or rabbits or other small animals raised for food. Chickens make harder shells if fed the calcium in kale and other greens. Animal bones should be cooked in soups to extract the marrow and soften the bones so calcium can be extracted.

• Compost piles are an example of permaculture. Plant scrapes and all manner of garbage are put into a warm, moist pile, which eventually becomes soil. Worms, egg shells, and garbage can go into this soil compost pile. Aerating the compost pile by turning it with a fork aids the decomposition process, as to the addition of earthworms.

• Soil erosion in farming is reduced if one uses plants as ground cover or otherwise avoids turning over the soil in windy places. A fish or other animal waste can be placed at the bottom of a seeded heap of soil, as fertilizer. The American Indians did not till the soil, but simply placed seeds into the ground, to conserve the topsoil

• Crops can be rotated in a manner that in the nutrient process. For instance, Alfalfa returns nitrogen to the soil.

• CO2 from human or animal breath helps plants grow, so a synergy between humans and animals living indoors near growing plants can be established.

• Heat from animals can also be recycled during cool times, by keeping the animals indoors with the plants or even in adjoining chambers next to human living quarters. In the middle ages, and even somewhat in pioneer times in the US, folks used the heat from their herds to keep themselves warm. The animals were housed in a lean to next to the house.

• Water can be recycled too. For instance, distilled water could be used for drinking and cooking. Rainwater can be used for bathing and washing clothes. Then the water from washing dishes or clothes or bathing could be poured into the gardens as the soap in essence makes a fertilizer and the water also does not go to waste. Then, when one creates urine, that also can be used for the gardens in such a way that it does not burn the plants.

• Adding human and animal waste to the soil recycles the waste as fertilizer. Ammonia should not be put directly onto plants, as it burns them. However, if the ammonia from waste is piped under the soil and raises up through it, it combines with the microbes and carbon in the soil to create nitrogen.

• Effluent from human sewage can be run into a holding tank to grow algae. The algae is then fed to fish, and the fish eaten. The effluent can also be run over oysters and clams, which cleanse the water while extracting nutrients. There are certain plants like bulrushes that cleanse sewage effluent, which creating a pleasant marsh area housing ducks and fish or other edible wildlife.

• If lacking firewood, animal waste, dehydrated, can be used as fuel for fire.

• As human or animal waste can carry disease, food grown in soil fertilized in this way should be well cooked. Such diseases as tetanus from horse manure, trichinosis from a parasite found in poorly cooked pork, and even the Ebola virus which spreads through poor hygiene can be eliminated though thorough cooking and good hygiene practices.