Why not?

Plenty of mad cows around already.

 

I thought Crocks were not trendy any more. But I see the gardening connection there, a nice thought!


A family vault?

 

I have seen enough crime dramas to disbelieve that a body could compost in 60 days. The idea is no more ridiculous than other death rituals and traditions however.

 

After a very short time the body breaks down. Slippage and other things are not things you'd ever want to see. Dramas don't show the true horror of bodies left to decompose.

I'd like to be cremated. My germs and all.

 

Strangely enough I was talking to a woman this morning who came across a suicide victim hanging from a tree, thought to be three weeks old.
The smell was the worst part she said.

 

It all comes down to their environment.

The crypts in New Orleans were meant to hold generations of families simply because down there, it typically takes a year to decompose in structures and heat.

If another member dies before a year is up, they store them until that time. Behind the body is a shaft that goes fairly deep for storing remains. When the crypt is needed and the year having paased by they shove the remains back and down the shaft.

That is where the saying "wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole" comes from. They used a looong handled pushbroom to do the shoving.

And they have crypts for fire departments...

 

Curiously I came across this story the other day. Apparently the Chinese have been storing cremation ashes in unused apartments in new tower blocks.
China bans storing cremated remains in empty 'bone ash apartments'

 

In permaculture they can make compost from even quite woody material in about 20 days. For the process you need about a cubic metre of material made up from layers of woody material, manure, high nitrogen material and usually a carcass (road kill is popular). Everything is stacked up and soaked down with the body in the middle, then covered to keep the heat and moisture in. The pile is turned daily or every other day and this keeps it hot. There is no sign of the body after about a week or so in most cases and you get very good compost at the end.

 

All this talk of composting, I'm surprised no one has mentioned red wrigglers. Apparently Soldier flies are the first to arrive at a new dead body, whereby red wrigglers like their food high. Not a pretty thought.

This business with us having new plastic containers for food scraps, we've been told by our council the scheme will start in the summer. Meanwhile, not far from where I live there's a facility being built for the scraps to be composted using gazillions of soldier fly larvae. I'm dreading to think where this will end!

 

We have had food composting here for years, at least 10 maybe more.

I was surprised to see all the fuss about it TBH, that and incineration for non recyclable stuff is nothing new.

 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

 

I'm not worried about the flies, only worried they'll put bodies in the mix. I only heard about the new soldier fly larvae system when I saw a local petition doing the rounds to stop the system.

I've a feeling our world is about to be changed with the war that rolling out, chemicals including fertiliser are already predicated to be in short supply. We must waste an awful lot of nutrients and materials. Quite a few years ago a local farmer accepted compost from a huge sewage lagoon near Heathrow. The lagoon was decades old. The smell from spreading the 'compost' had a distinct heavy metallic smell, which makes me think that the iron supplements we take don't break down.

 

Indeed, I like that sentence very much. It's so peaceful, comforting and beautiful way to word the feeling at the end of life. It describes a circle that was meant to be.

What I don't like about it is the relationship to a human life as we witness it (nowadays very casually with the wonderful medical scans etc), that starts with moist cells poking about in a slimy liquid.

Ashes? Dust? How does that relate with a young couple watching a live scan of their featus developing in the mother's uterus.