The Way We Were
Wool bathing suits, stubby beer bottles, and acid rain. We sure have come far, cottagers
FASHION FIX
Bathing suits through the decades
The game changers
Life at the cottage wouldn’t be the same without them.
—Jackie Davis
THE COMPOSTING TOILET
“Operating a composting toilet requires a level of labour beyond what many people are prepared to accept,” we wrote in October 1996. Maybe, but most cottagers learned to embrace them. These toilets were, afterall, a huge improvement over the world’s earliest composting units: ceramic containers. Collect human waste, store it inside a designated pot, wait for a long time for parasites inside to die, then use the result as fertilizer. Genius! But kind of disgusting! Thankfully, England’s Henry Moule patented a somewhat better version in 1860 (you “flushed” dirt over your waste).
