Anyone Planning to Turn Dead Relatives Into Garden Compost?

Well, if you are going to go to the trouble of planting them then they may as well make themselves useful. IMO it beats embalming them and putting them in a sealed box, inside a concrete vault, which makes less and less sense to me every day.

LOL!

Soylent Green is people! It's people!

^^ Har!

"My mom and my sister are still out on the garage."

I seem to recall that you repeatedly told them not to touch your stuff. There's only so much a man can take.

Yeah...no

Apparently, if we could swiftly and naturally become human compost we can nourish new life. Who knew? It uses one-eighth of the energy of cremation.

I read about this today in the arts section of my newspaper. It’s the architecture that impressed them.

“Founder and CEO of Recompose, Katrina Spade, invented the system taking cues from farming methods used for recycling livestock. “We’re using nature – which has perfected the life/death cycle – as a model for human death care,” she says. “We saw an opportunity to both give back to the earth and reconnect us with natural cycles.” Early prototypes were designed in collaboration with Olson Kundig, and now the Seattle-based architecture firm is transforming a 1960s-built warehouse into the inaugural 18,500 sq ft facility.

The process is coffin-free. Corpses are wrapped in a cotton shroud and placed on a steel cradle filled with straw, wood chips and alfalfa. A “laying-in” ritual follows that the family can attend, during which more of these ingredients are added, before the cradle slides into a hexagonal receptacle. Staff remove the shroud and seal the compartment to allow the 30-day process to begin.

Renderings of Recompose: Seattle reveal a futuristic-like hive, with a central gathering space for ceremonies, surrounded by hexagonal-shaped storage for up to 75 bodies. The design deliberately references nature, “specifically, the collective community of a beehive”, says architect Alan Maskin, a principal of Olson Kundig. “It has good structural properties, enabling us to vertically stack the vessels, which is important because Recompose’s focus is on providing a sustainable death-care alternative for our cities, where space is at a premium.” After a month, the rich, dark, newly created soil is removed and can be donated to local forest conservation projects or taken home by relatives and used to plant new life.”

Good grief!

If a person were to ever move and the house was put up for sale, I'd imagine one would have to disclose there if there is a body buried in the back yard. That might be a little off-putting to some prospective buyers. 

Here in California we can't go composting human remains willy nilly, but a new law goes into effect this coming July that will allow for Alkaline Hydrolysis. This "water cremation" turns a human body into a brownish syrupy residue, with left over bones. This residue, that looks a lot like Starbuck's Frappuccino, can be poured down the sink. But why waste it?



Coming on the heels of another new California law, that allows folks to scoop up road kill for dinner table consumption, those cable cooking shows may soon be getting some competition from YT amateurs. Imagine the combined possibilities:



Oh, Deer Granny Soup



Cats in the Kettle With Left Over Bob



Flat Possum with Auntie au Jus



Add in a wood chipper, to tenderize the road kill that's past its use-by date to get:



Chunka Chunka Burning Cuz



Brown Fondu ala Frank



Auntie Em and her Flying Monkeys

When one of the previous owners of our last house died the family asked if they could scatter her ashes at the end of our field and plant some daffodils (her name being Daphne).

Sure, why not.  They had a very nice open air ceremony with wine and eats and afterwards I also made sure to leave the daffs to die off before mowing them down.

We did not mention this to the new owners.

ETA Sorry - this was intended as a response to JDC's post about disclosing corpses in the garden.