Spring has sprung in many areas of the Northern hemisphere and around the world people are planting gardens. It will come as no news to those in many Asian countries but in the West people buy fertilizer while, literally, flushing a better source of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf9029157 carried a study “Human Urine and Wood Ash as Plant Nutrients for Red Beet (Beta vulgaris) Cultivation: Impacts on Yield Quality” conducted in Finland which showed not only that using human urine or urine mixed with wood ashes from your stove or fireplace worked as a fertilizer, but produced 10-27% more vegetables by weight than standard modern mineral fertilizers.
“Red beets were fertilized with 133 kg of N/ha as mineral fertilizer, urine and ash, and only urine with no fertilizer as a control. The mineral-fertilized plants and urine- and ash-fertilized plants also received 89 kg of P/ha. Urine and ash and only urine fertilizer produced 1720 and 656 kg/ha more root biomass, respectively, versus what was obtained from the mineral fertilizer.” J. Agric. Food Chem., 2010, 58 (3), pp 2034-2039
DOI: 10.1021/jf9029157, Publication Date (Web): January 5, 2010
Copyright (c) 2010 American Chemical Society
If you’re planning on trying this yourself don’t just take it out on your plants directly, besides the public decency statutes, if not diluted the urine applied directly would probably burn the plants. You need to dilute the yellow gold, but don’t try to store it, urine undergoes a chemical reaction producing ammonia and the characteristic big city alley stink after a few hours.
Before using, dilute the pee by about 30 to 1 (30 parts water) and apply at the roots or on the soil, not on the leaves.
And, very important, do I need to point out that other waste products (#2) ARE NOT sterile, and, in fact, are extremely dangerous so do not attempt to collect and use the brown, stick to the yellow.
