I know it was a thing on reddit, but how does everyone feel about peeing on your compost? Apparently it really helps, but I’ve never brought myself to do it.
I collect it in jugs and then apply it to my compost and sometimes straight to my garden. If a bush looks yellowish from lack of nitrogen, a two gallon jug of urine that’s been sitting a while will corrrct that. I have also used it to nourish vegetable bed soil. And yes the compost pile when it is too heavy on browns. I have been wanting try a pile that is only shredded cardboard and urine to see how that works.
My system is like this: I bought cat litter in jugs. They’re 2.5 gallons, I think? Then I nailed a funnel to the side of my house just outside the back door. A bit of siphon tubing goes to the jug. This way, I can duck out for a quick pee without hiking up to my pile every time, which requires putting on shoes. It takes a week or two for the jug to fill. Yes it stinks when you empty it but you follow up with a little water from the garden hose and it’s fine.
Human urine is the most nitrogen rich material most folks have access to. People talk about coffee grinds and grass clippings as “nitrogen bombs” but this isn’t true: they are only mildly N-rich, and pretty close to balanced. Same with kitchen scraps. Browns are a lot easier to find. Dry dead plant matter, paper, cardboard, wood products and sawdust are heavily C rich. To balance those you need chicken blood meal, manure, etc which most of us don’t have sitting around. OR urine, which all of us have.
This is why it’s always recommended. Also, the phosphorous. We’re actually running out of places to mine phosphorous on the surface of the earth. And it’s essential for all agriculture. So there are large scale efforts around the world to harvest Ph from urine, which is everywhere that people are, and available in large quantities via big buildings with urinals, or the sewage treatment system itself.
It’s gold. It’s also safe to handle. Nearly sterile. I got over the gross factor long ago. Changing diapers or scooping the cat box is way worse.
I was looking for natural fertilizer for Malawi and came across a Kenyan study if im not mistaken that had villagers peed into a storage tank just to explore the usability of urea as local fertilizer. There were some interesting findings but the thing was that urine was too strong to use directly as fertilizer. directly on plants would overfeed and burn the plants. They mixed it with 1:10 with water to get to a right mixture
when we collected urine in the past in a systematic way for a little while, we “fermented” it for a month to convert some of the urea into ammonia - which is much more beneficial to plants (though it is also volatile and some can be lost). There is a good reason for doing that, but I do not recall it - possibly something to do with “alkalinity”. But urea would also ferment or otherwise be metabolized well enough in situ. If there is too much in one place, it can affect salinity though and might be detrimental. What amount - not sure.
If nothing else it saves gallons of water daily.
