>   What's the Jenkins bucket?

"The Humanure Handbook: A guide to composting human manure", by Joseph
Jenkins, describes a dead-simple system. Basically you "output" in a bucket,
covering each deposit with rotting sawdust, peat moss (we have acres of peat
bog here) or other locally-available organic cover. If you cover well,
there's no stink and no flies. You don't even need a vent stack. He suggests
using 3 or 4 5-gallon pails, with a regular toilet seat mounted on a simple
frame with a hinged lid that you can open for exchanging the buckets.
Needless to say, you can put this together for next to nothing.

Then you periodically empty the buckets into a properly-managed compost
pile. Done right, you get thermophilic composting (even if the pile remains
frozen all winter, it'll fire up just fine in the spring) and the resulting
compost can (and Jenkins argues, should) be used to "complete the nutrient
recycling process" by fertilizing food crops. Like most people, I initially
thought this was a really bad idea, but I challenge anyone to read this book
and retain that presumption.

We just bought our buckets and a nice long compost thermometer.

See:

http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html

BTW, the entire text of the second edition is available on-line (this link
is the first one on the above page:

http://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html

Jenkins is an organic gardener. He and his family have been composting their
humanure and using it on their food garden for over 20 years. Aside from
this rather clear example of the system working, the book presents a wealth
of in-depth research. We're sold.