Toilet installation will be on the 1st and 2nd April, so the main gate car park entrance will be unavailable on those days.
We have been very fortunate to receive funding from the Scottish Government for a Composting toilet. It is a Kazuba 1 which is waterless and the only composting toilet suitable for our site due to the high water table and watercourses.
It has a chimney and will use sun and wind power to dry the pee, poo and paper that goes into the toilet. The air comes down the toilet and up the chimney to do the drying via solar heat and the whirling chimney top (see diagram). So no smell and nothing else down the toilet. There will be a bin and black biodegradable dog bags for sanitary waste that can’t go down the toilet. There will be hand sanitiser and wipes for the toilet, these will go in the bin. The wipes are made from Tencel a wood based product and have cleaner on them. Alternatively you can use the alcohol based wipes to clean the doorhandles and toilet. All of these MUST go in the bin NOT THE TOILET.
As part of the funding application we have environmental targets to achieve. We have been meeting these already and we will continue to do so. Sheena has taken seven and a half ton bags of leaves by volume for making into leaf compost. We have a new large bed for filling for communal leaf composting. The Wee Spuds took shredded tree prunings for bark on their paths. We can make our own compost, in the polytunnel (news to come) we can put a ton bag with straw and fresh horse manure from the path or fields with mushroom compost on top and grow pumpkins or squash this year and have the best compost for cucumbers next year.
Website, recycling and sharing produce and knowledge all part of our CCAF targets
We are making a new website and David is ready to take your contributions. There will be a place for you to chart your own plot and its development. We will have a public section for us to share advice for people growing at home so we can extend our growing community out into the village. This links well with Keep Scotland Beautiful’s’ It’s Your Neighbourhood’ campaign.
Please let Sheena know when you have shared produce and plants so we can count this, hedging and fruit bushes are already earmarked for the new nature pond water field at the park.
There will also be an opportunity to take leaves and bark from the village for your individual plots. We are setting up new worm composting on two sites so there is plenty of experience to share, online, in person and to the village when our open days and membership meetings and workdays return.
Polytunnel will be being installed late April or early May.
We have received a grant from Stirling Council for a polytunnel, the committee and Wee Spuds will share the build cost. We applied for a second year of Co-op funding to help them do this. There will be 3 beds for the Wee Spuds and 3 for us to have growing from seed to share plants and for those who can’t have a greenhouse.
Committee members – Margaret Meager (Chair), Bruce Mackinnon (Vice-Chair), Sheena McDonald (Secretary) blanevalleyallotments@btinternet.com, Ian Grant (Treasurer), Mike McNulty, Charlie Haggerty, David Malone and Ruth Downham.
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