The Integral Urban House

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

A TASTE OF HONEY

Of course, no homestead—urban or otherwise—would be 100% complete without at least one beehive. And the Integral Urban House (as already mentioned) has two of them, located on a platform high above the fish pond.

"The bees are our foreign envoys," house manager Tom Davits grins. "They go out and pollinate the neighbors' flowers, then bring the nectar back here and make it into honey."

Bees are another ideal variety of city "livestock". They're quiet, they take care of themselves, and—most important—you don't feed them . . . they feed you! Integral House residents recently harvested 35 pounds of delicious eucalyptus honey from their hives, and—according to Tom—the IUH bee operation yields several times that amount of the sweetener over the course of a year.

So that others may learn about beekeeping, the Integral House offers membership in a bee club. (Members can use the house's honey extractor and other equipment, as well as attend classes in beekeeping.) In addition, the IUH maintains an observation beehive on the first floor, where visitors can observe the bees as they do their fascinating dances, see the queen lay her eggs, or watch new workers hatch. (The show is better than TV, by far!)

WASTE MANAGEMENT

A great deal of attention is given to the intelligent recycling of wastes at Integral Urban House. As a result, nothing (aside from those occasional bits of plastic packaging that everything from cheese to nails now seems to come in) is "thrown away". Milk cartons become planters for seedlings, bags are re-used at the market, scraps of paper are burned in the wood stove . . . even garbage, human wastes, and dirty water are recycled right on the premises.

Kitchen garbage, of course, becomes compost . . . but not until it's been picked through by the chickens. The refuse is spread on the floor of the hens' pen, which allows the birds to get an extra ration of eats while creating a valuable nitrogen-rich ingredient (chicken manure) for the IUH composting operation.

Whenever a new batch of compost is started—which is to say, every two or three weeks—the waste material is [1] raked from the floor of the chicken pen, [2] combined with manure and sawdust from the rabbit cages and plant debris from the garden, [3] layered into one of three 3'-square wooden compost bins, and [4] emptied into an adjoining bin every three days thereafter. (One of the three containers is always full of "working" compost, one always contains bucketfuls of the finished natural fertilizer, and the third is kept empty so that—as desired—either of the other two can be turned into it.)

Human wastes are also composted, but not in bins. Instead, the wastes decompose inside a waterless toilet known as the Clivus Multrum, which is approved by health officials in Sweden (where the device is widely used) but not-except in Maine, where water has been getting scarce lately—in the U.S. Local authorities have allowed the Integral Urban House to use a Clivus Multrum on an experimental basis.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print