Self Sustaining Envionment

[josh71]

I am a dude with the idea of making a self sustainable community somewhere in the main land of Esaan or chantaburi. I hear durian trees and other fruit trees can not grow in esaan, so my second choice would be chantaburi as I am told its the best place to grow fruit trees.

Anyway, here is the vision:

people with spiritual background getting "back" to nature living together in a cummunity of small houses around a common building for all to use. It has kitchen(s), living room etc. then you have your "private" house a little away from there just as 4-6 others has.

Solar panels would be used for getting electricity.

fruit trees everywhere.

vegetables grown under the trees.

chickens running around.

small lake to breed fish.

I have no experience in this whatsoever, so I would love input from people that knows about these things.

Also I was thinking of trying to find alternative building materials for the houses. whats possible in thailand?

septictanks: I would like to hear if there is any other solutions than to dump your shit under the ground? I am told it pollutes the clean water supply that you pull up from the ground(with a solar pump off course)?

Good ideas, warnings, recommendation, opinions etc. are appreciated.

thanks

joshua

[tgeezer]

What a lovely idea. You must be practical though vegetables do not grow well under fruit trees, but that is a minor point there will be plenty of advice from people in the area to put you straight. I would like to point out that there is nothing wrong with shit, in fact it is one thing which doesn't pollute. Earth closets are the way to go if you are growing anything, instead of flushing, a covering of earth is applied, the cistern contains fine earth, the loo is a bucket, which container when full the contents are put aside eventually to be used again but as the quantity will increase that which is not recycled makes very a very fertile growing medium for all sorts of veg. Oh yes forgot to mention, pee is seperated by the simple expedient of having a divider across the middle of the bowl just abaft the goolies, the product being bound for a different destination later to be used to accelerate the composting process. If you google you are bound to find examples from past centuries. The water closet is a solution to a problem of overcrowding and convenience not something which would concern a commune like yours. I am considering the Earth closet for use in my house in England, it would mean some redesign, best to empty through the outside wall, in spite of the fact that it is odourless I wouldn't want to pad across carpets with a bucket full of ...

Edited February 10, 2009 by tgeezer

[Moonrakers]

You wouldn't want my shit on your veggie patch.

[Gerontion]

Plenty of European/American hippies doing this type of thing in the North. Have a look at Pun Pun or the Panya Project. They both do training courses of one type or another.

[Gerontion]

To add to my earlier post (which weirdly, I can't edit): There are, of course, rather a lot of Thais doing this too and if you speak - or learn to speak/read - Thai, there's a lot of information available. Have a look at the King's self-sufficiency projects, for example. Regarding shit, do a Google search for the Humanure Handbook - everything you could possibly want to know about turds is in it. There's info on earth building on <URL Automatically Removed>. Unless you want to do nothing more than light a bulb, forget about solar. There's also plenty of useful information in the farming section of this website and some of the stuff at www.echotech.org is pretty good.

Edit: I see that Thaivisa's childish policy of banning any mention of other Thai-related forums is still in place. Well, there's info on earth building on another Thai expat forum. I'm afraid that you'll have to do a little bit of research to find out which.

Edited February 11, 2009 by Gerontion