Pee fertilizer

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by kikosisko, May 31, 2007.

  1. kikosisko

    kikosisko Junior Member

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    HI anyone using Pee as a fertilizer? Im new to gardening and am in the innercity and have no space for a composting toilet and would probably get thrown in jail or lynched for that anyway so i decided to pee in a jug and dilute it with water. That way i wont be wasting flush water and will be watering and feeding the garden too! any thoughts? im keeping plastic bottles by the toilet for this purpose.
     
  2. SueinWA

    SueinWA Junior Member

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    First, check out The Humanure Book by Joseph Jenkins, free text online at https://www.weblife.org/humanure/default.html

    Unless you have a bladder infection or something like leptospirosis, your urine should be sterile. You'll have to dilute it 1:10 with water. I think you have to use it fairly fresh, and not store it.

    Try it on a few plants and see how it goes. Just keep in mind that nitrogen isn't a complete fertilizer, so read up on what your plants require.
     
  3. gardenlen

    gardenlen Group for banned users

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    g'day,

    we use it all the time, my pee gets collected and used daily generally for no other reason it is mixed with other grey water so it goes around to more plants. everyone should dispose of their wee water in other ways, just doesn't make sense to use scarce drinking water to flush it as very many do.

    when you read "humanure" maybe you could use a bucket and sawdust and recycle your own waste that way, somewhere somehow i want to get back to a composting toilet routine, again not necessary to waste scarce water flushing a good resource, only to have them filter it and send it back for everyone to drink it.

    because we use wee water we don't get the neighbours ferel cats in our gardens. they used to come before we moved in and recycled.

    len
     
  4. kathleenmc

    kathleenmc Junior Member

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    Yep use it all the time in my garden, watered down and put onto the vege patch or put into the compost, straight not diluted. It's wonderful stuff...we 'waste' so much in our society that is so useful. Go for it I say, reiterate what the others say...read the humanure book and remember that it's very nitogenous.

    Kathleen
     
  5. kikosisko

    kikosisko Junior Member

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    yeah ive been using it. and i also have read and reread Jenkings Humanure handbook but right now live in the city so no sawdust toilet yet. i chopped down all the weeds in front of the house put newspaper, doused it in diluted pee. put an inch or two of compost on top and then an inch of rotting grass clippings. where i already had sunflowers an cowpeas i just mulched the seedlings heavily with the grass. in the other beds i made i planted pole beans straight into the mulch and i transplanted some tomatoe seedlings and put melon seeds. i also put flower and salad seeds under very thin mulch. i know the beans will push through but im hoping underground bugs come to munch up the weeds and newspaper so that the roots will be able to go down. im new to all this and my family garden was always tilled. any thoughts?
     
  6. sweetpea

    sweetpea Junior Member

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    kikosisko, yep, I love using urine not just for fertilizer, but it is also keeping my gophers away as far as I can tell. We pee out ammonia, which is a stable form of nitrogen. That ammonia can latch onto the organic particles in your soil and stay put, otherwise when it's in a plant cell, the cell breaks down and the nitrogen, a gas, just escapes into the air. And pee is how animals tell each other, Hey! This is my territory, get outta here!!


    For the gophers (or any ground rodent) I pour it down the holes and block the holes, I don't collapse the tunnels, because I want the ammonia to fill up their tunnels and send them running. I find the tunnels filled up and no more activity. I'll know more after I've done if for a year, but so far it looks good.

    I also put it into compost tea where the microbes can work on it more.

    I store mine in old juice bottles and old milk jugs. We want all the bacteria we can get because that's what plants love. And it's better to over-dilute it than not. vegetables don't really need as much nitrogen as they need phosphorous and potassium, so diluting it a lot is fine, it will be there when they need it.

    And in a drought, if you don't have to flush the toilet so much, you save a lot of water :)
     
  7. Tezza

    Tezza Junior Member

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    Yeah Peeing is good as long as its diluted a bit..

    As a guy ,,or for that matter any agile lady wee can be done anywhere,up around established fruit trees is great stuff,I just do it anywhere i feel like it ha ha...Watch the neighbours dont get offended too much thouh..

    As for Wee being a good animal scarer offer ..yes i agree that it does have its other uses...

    I have a small hole in my fence that allows my chooks to go onto open range uring the day and they roam around the neighbourhood,Well yesterday a fox was spotted after 9.30 am walking around from my fence hole and around to my front area...TIMELY reminder to go for a good wee or 4 around my cook exits( goota keep away from neighbours prying eyes though.Its been discussed before the benifits of urine in here,if ya got a dog who ya can train to do it nearby ,will/may also scare off other predertary animals..

    As for our POOS well theres plenty of uses for that waste as well....Maggots love the stuff chooks love maggots....
    Fish and crustations love maggots also.Plenty of nutrients in poos and maggots...



    Tezza
     
  8. sweetpea

    sweetpea Junior Member

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    Tezza, there is the risk of the e. coli in our poo remaining on the feet of a fly that the chooks don't get the maggot, or that flies in independently, that then flies into the kitchen and walks on food or counters, or any surface we come in contact with, spreading e. coli. when it's in our lower intestines it helps keep us alive, when it's in our stomachs, we get really, really sick.

    And that's why the composting toilets still need an extra year of cooking because we can't guarantee we've killed all the e. coli bacteria just by a hopefully hot composting, but more often is a cooler, long-term composting. :)
     
  9. Tezza

    Tezza Junior Member

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    Point taken Sweetpea Havent done much with the poo stuff apart from see if it works 8) 8) 8)

    Would love to have a system that does it all automaticly and efficiently

    Thanks


    Tezza
     
  10. pauloz

    pauloz Junior Member

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    wee wees

    Gday from Bunnos
    On this lovely topic of weeing for the future
    Will human wee ()male or female) stop rabbits and kangaroos from eating my veges, will it keep the foxes away from my chooks, will my gorgeous golden retrievers pee help in any way
    CHEERS PAUL
     
  11. frosty

    frosty Junior Member

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    Hi Paul

    it certainly keeps the foxes away from our chook house :wink: just not sure if it is mr frosty's or the dogs that does the trick :lol: :lol:

    I dont know about rabbits or roos :? maybe .........

    frosty
     
  12. sweetpea

    sweetpea Junior Member

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    frosty, do you ring the chook house with it? or where do you put it?


    pauloz, because pee is ammonia, it can burn roots and leaves of plants if applied directly. To deter animals away you'd need it full strength, and then you'd need the wind to be blowing in the proper direction, so it's not the most reliable.

    I used to keep deer, rabbits, etc., off my veggies with an egg yolk spray, separate 2 yolks from whites (because whites clog and sprayer) stir and strain into a spray bottle of water (because there are always a few blobs of yolk that could clog as well), add a couple drops of hot sauce and a few drops of vegetable oil, shake well, and apply to veggies. Repeat every three days, then once a week. Repeat if it rains.

    if you are in an arid climate where it gets very dry by the end of summer and the animals will eat anything, either increase your egg yolks or cover your plants with an old white sheet. I usually gave up the last month before it rained, they weren't deterred at all.

    There's a chemical in yolks that most mammals don't like, and they will avoid it. It doesn't have to smell rotten to get them to stay away. You won't be able to smell it.

    But my biggest and best solution is to fence it all in. I had no idea just how much there were nibbling, including the clovers I was using for a cover crop. My plants are doing 10 times better now that nothing can get at them. :)
     
  13. hedwig

    hedwig Junior Member

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    back to the oee..
    We still do not collect it, only my husband waters the compost bin. We simply have to search something practic. We are a female dominated household. The girls don't want to pee in the garden and as an adult it would be simply strange for our neighbours. A suburban household does not have space in the garden bulding an illegal compost toilet, we have no acces to sawdust and we don't want to have untidy buckets in our micro bathroom.
    However I really would prefer to collect this fertilizer.
    Perhaps the whole compost toilet thing hs to be reinvented to something small, cheap practic.
     
  14. sweetpea

    sweetpea Junior Member

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    hedwig, I buy 2 quart/ 1.89 liter fruit juice bottles and use those with a large funnel from the car items section of the drug store. I set it in the bathtub until it's full. As soon as I fill one up I use it outside, so it's not in the way. Once you get used to it, it's easy, and it is soooo worth it :)
     
  15. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    P

    Recycling urine answer to P supply
    Dani Cooper
    ABC Science Online


    Tuesday, 10 July 2007
    Pee for P
    Urine is one of the most accessible sources of the element phosphorus, chemical symbol P

    [​IMG]

    Recycling urine may be the answer to a looming global shortage of phosphorus, an Australian researcher says.

    Associate Professor Cynthia Mitchell, of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), says the world's deposits of phosphorus are due to run out in about 50 years.

    And she says recycling the 500 litres of urine each person produces a year is the solution.

    "Urine is the most concentrated source of phosphorus," she says. "At the moment we dilute that through our sewage system and send it out to the ocean.

    More here
    https://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/pl ... 202007&p=1
     
  16. paul wheaton

    paul wheaton Junior Member

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    A pretty common theme for progressive farms is to pee all over the farm and poop in the outhouses. In fact, they are generally quite adamant "do not pee in the outhouses."
     
  17. hedwig

    hedwig Junior Member

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    and isn't phosphorus what's most lacking of australian soils? (Or was it potassium??)
    there is a second reason having an outside urine collecting toilet: I don't want to have male guests in our toilet!
     
  18. Uncle Yarra

    Uncle Yarra Junior Member

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    I have prickly pear in a container on our verandah. It's a bit out of the way so it doesn't get any rain unless it's blowing a gale. The only liquid this thing gets is urine and it doesn't miss a beat, i.e. some fruit every year. In fact, I have had to trim it back (prickles getting a bit close to the urine dispenser) despite it being in
     
  19. sweetpea

    sweetpea Junior Member

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    Michaelangela, doncha just love it...chicka boom, chicka boom, boom, boom!! :)
     
  20. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Hahahahaha!

    We encourage people here on the farm to pee wherever they feel the need to, targeting the base of trees.

    We also encourage people to pee in the double vault composting latrine. The objection to urine in a composting toilet is the smell, but we just add more sawdust, keeps the smell down, and the urine helps make the compost HOT.

    Rice hulls work well, too.
     

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