Haha. Mrs. C, they do make commercial versions which are designed for clay-heavy soil. Also, if you wanted to create a leach field, you wouldn't need to dig a huge hole. You would just dig a hole for the tank, then use a perforated drain pipe with holes in it leading away from it along a trench with gravel in it. Home Depot has them. It would look like this: 0--------

(I gots your back, Mr. C.)

Anyway, yes, so I got this concentrated liquid stuff which is supposed to be used in a ratio of one tablespoon to one gallon of water and it treats a large septic tank for a month. The bacteria is supposed to double every 30 minutes, though I think this is supposed to be in a liquid medium.

There were 64 ounces in the bottle. I poured over half the bottle into the poo pit over the weekend. Yeah, I'm sure it was overkill, but I'm kinda impatient. Something really juicy happened over the weekend. I am pleased with the resulting chemistry. Check out the previous pics to compare with what it looked like this morning:



Over the weekend I went to the local hippie gardening store to find red worms - the ones that Mrs. C mentioned. They were like $15 for a small container. Too much for my purposes. And the local bait stores were out of them. I went to visit my folks about an hour and a half a way and found them in the fishing section at their local WalMart:



I don't know if they are Eisenia Fetida, but they said Jumbo Red Worms on the container. They were two bucks for 25 worms, so I got three containers. That's 75 worms employed as my Avengers team.

Here's what they look like in the pit, sans the superhero costumes:



The bottom right of pic contains new poop from this morning. The rest of the bucket contains the worms which are poking out of the soil in which they were packed. I'm sure it serves as food for them as well.

So there you have it. I have worms in my poo pit. If they survive, they should speed up the process. If they don't, I'll just get more, but at least now I have tenants to care for.

Will keep you posted on their progress. May even throw in some other species in there if I can get them cheap.

Because it has intrigue.

It has danger.

It has mother-fuckin' live worms in mother-fuckin' dog poo.

Update on the worms. I think one of the redworms died. It no move no more. Plus there are ants gathering, so something died somewhere in all that. Couldn't see any other redworms on the surface. Either they escaped, or are eating their way through the poo.

Fly, be free my lovelies.

So I found a small petshop in a mall. Mom and pop outfit which smelled like rabbit urine. -I know my rabbit urine, y'all.

They had "meal worms" for sale for a little more than two bucks. Here they are in a three-inch little tub - the kind you might get take-away salsa in, only it contains worms and sawdust:



The worms are about an inch or so long.

And into the poo pit they go:



They wriggle pretty good. No idea if they're good for composting, but if they're not, they'll make good composting themselves.

Okay, what other kind of worms should I get to toss into the poo pit?

thoughts cantrip-

you've turned a bacterial/enzyme decomposition into a larger organism compost heap. Adding in the dirt and sawdust means your altering the environment pretty drastically and I dont think youre going to achieve the same results. I actually would be slightly worried as at this point youve added most everything you need to create a combustible fuel. I know it sounds funny but you may end up with a flaming poo geyser in your backyard, which would quickly not be fun.


Mealworms eat, well, meal. Mostly vegetarian and as an insect larvae (instead of a true worm) they're not going to be as eager to munch on feces. Plus they're going to hatch at some point and you'll have a bug population going on. I think best case youre going to hope these guys just die off before they have a chance to hatch.


Its not a bad idea to turn the poop into a compost heap, but you'll want to do it in an open environment where you can turn the pile over. You'll also need to create a larger initial seed compost of other organic materials for the poop to be mixed into. Itd be a larger scale production and require more work, but would function fairly well.

youre more likely to generate hydrogen sulfide from anaerobic bacteria breaking down in the non-oxygenated regions. Hydrogen sulfide is well, hydrogen based and can burn. I think thats where you end up with the flammability but I'm not sure, havent studied poo pits in depth. Perhaps this will give me a reason to do so.

And yea, I'm pretty sure your worms arent going to live long, not just from the gasses but also from the heat that'll be generated. Well, the mealworms will just starve to death most likely, but a few may hatch and the beetles will probably not do so hot, or might escape.

If you do the enzyme stuff, try saturating with H20 first and then add the enzyme. Enzymes typically require moist/liquid environments to live in so if its too dry in the poop pit they might die off as well.

and yea- we still burn off poo with jet fuel, but you can always just whip up some napalm easy if you want to burn it out.

So, I've been filling the poo pit on the lower right side of pic while leaving the worm contents alone. Today I had to dump the latest load - several days' worth - into the top portion of the bucket in the pic.

I saw live redworms and meal worms.




In the pic, the bottom left third is the portion where I had dropped the redworm container contents a week ago. You'll notice some redworms, if that's what they are, are sticking out. Seems like it has caved in a little. Haha, there are five meal worms hangin out in a row on a turd near the center.

The bottom right third is the poo from this last week, save for the last several days. You'll notice there's some fuzz growing on it. And some meal worms are hangin on the highest point in the pile - bottom and to the right.

The top third of the contents of the bucket are the droppings from the last several days. Big contrast from the bottom two thirds.

Gonna get some more worms this weekend. Dunno what kind I will get, but will just drop in the worms, not the sawdust or dirt they come in. Will probably drop some more of the concentrated liquid treatment. Will try to keep the worm-dropping segment free of poop and treatment to give the worms someplace to stay if they don't like the conditions elsewhere in the bucket.

I'm thinking of getting probing thermometer with a remote digital readout to monitor the temperature inside the bucket.

So, there hasn't been a deposit into the poo pit for several days.

Came home from a short trip and the dog sitter who would come in to feed an play with the dog said he was lethargic and hadn't eaten for a couple of days.

He wouldn't even get up. Watched him overnight and then took him to vet the following morning.

After a battery of tests, they said it was pancreatitis. They didn't know what was causing it, but put him on Vitamin K in case it was rat poison poisoning. He was dehydrated and malnourished because he was vomiting everything. They recommended keeping him overnight for IV fluids, IV drip feeding and pain meds.

An ultrasound and xrays did not show he had a digestive obstruction.

In the middle of the night they discovered blood in his eyes and bruising of his body in several places. They stopped the fluids after discovering his platelet count dropped. Platelets make your blood clot. Without platelets, you bruise easily and can bleed to death.

New prognosis was auto-immune disease. They administered steroids to stop his body from attacking itself and said to take him to the 24-hr ER vet for possible plasma and blood transfusion. They couldn't watch him the rest of the weekend.

At the ER vet hospital they did further xrays to rule out cancer in his lungs. They did more tests and suggested keeping him there for a couple of days for fluids and observation. He looked way better this afternoon.

Vet said that he would probably need some kind of steroids the rest of his life to keep him from relapsing even if he pulled through this time. Dog is going to be 9 years old this fall.

As of 10 p.m. PDT this evening, he's still there. Probably going to just pull him out tomorrow because this is all become very very expensive. No plasma needed as of this point, which would jack the price even further in no time.

I'm not paying the bills because I'm not "his owner" but damn -dog better start shitting gold ingots to cover his medical expenses.

Nether vet was able to say what was causing all this. And no, the poo pit is not the cause. The pit is located in a fenced-off area he can't access.

Here is a pic of him with his belly shaved for the ultrasound. Notice the brusing on his belly near his balls.

"At the age of 14, an Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking I suggest you try it." - Dr. Evil

The dog is going to be 9 years old this fall sometime. That's over 55 in human years.

Shit, if you have a pet you're not just gonna put down at the first sign of illness, I would suggest you look into getting pet health insurance.

He was released a day before the ER vet would have liked. No platelets. No white blood cells. He's on two immune system suppressants. One of which is prednisone, a steroid, and the other is Cyclosporine. The Cyclosporine pills need to be handled using rubber gloves so we don't come in contact with the drug.

Basically, if he gets an infection, he's fucked because he has no way to fight it. They gave him broad-spectrum antibiotics just in case.

We need to take him back tomorrow to do futher bloodwork, but at least the cost of the overnight stay won't dig into the final cost of the care. Need to find out if his platelets are returning.

They could have done a bone marrow biopsy requiring him to be sedated and it would have left him in pain. They would have preferred to do a biopsy on the spleen to find out if it was leukemia or lymphoma. The spleen biopsy would have required the platelet plasma transfer to keep him from bleeding to death.

Either way, who cares? If it is either, the expensive treatment would have been cost-prohibitive. The treatment would have started with prednisone anyway, so we're doing what they would have done either way.

So, will add some more poop in a few days. Here's what the pit looked like this morning.



It seemed dry to me. Not sure I saw any of the worms moving. There were some tiny files in the pit.

After the pic, I took the pressure hose and churned the contents with water. When the bucket was full and the pace of the drainage slowed, i emptied the rest of the concentrated liquid enzyme into the pit. Probably about 15 ounces worth.

We'll see what that does.

In the meantime, please enjoy the following gratuitous pic of the dog's lipstick. -He is very happy to be home.