Urine as a fertiliser

[watervole]

In answer to a couple of questions:

Urine is a fabulous free fertiliser.  It contains nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus in the ideal ratio for plants (in commercial fertilizers, you'll commonly see this referred to as the NPK ratio).  It also contains a good collection of trace elements.

Logical really - it contains all the elements necessary to produce food for human beings.

It's also a liquid feed, which means that plants can take it up very quickly in their roots.

I started down this path several years ago after reading 'Liquid Gold'   Surprisingly, given the subject, it's a light, entertaining read with all sorts of interesting facts.

I tried it on the allotment and found the results were quick and impressive.  Onions did really well, ailing bean plants suddenly shot up.  Courgettes and all kinds of plants love it.  Right now, my only problem is not having enough to go round!

If you talk to older gardeners, they'll tell you that their parents and grandparents used this trick, especially during the war.

It should always be used dilute.  Neat urine is too strong and could scorch roots.  The ideal ratio is around 1 part urine to at  least six parts water.  It isn't a precise measurement.  I use plastic milk bottles to collect and transport it.  The screw-top lids avoid any risk of spillage or smell.  Gentlemen can pee directly into the bottle.  If I'm contributing myself, I use a jug and then pour it into the milk bottle.

I then take the bottles down to the allotment and use half a bottle to a watering can full of water.  That's two pints/ one litre to a typical 2  gallon (16 pints) can which makes for easy arithmetic.

One of the most interesting results I find is that treated plants seem to be more resistant to slugs.  I'm guessing the trace elements and NPK just improve their natural defences.  Certainly, my much-munched runner beans are now showing several new shoots from once bare stems.  (To be fair, I also removed neighbouring weeds which were probably providing shelter for the slugs.)

Try it - see if it works for you.  

I made several converts when I last posted on this subject - it's very easy to see a quick improvement if you have an ailing plant.

If you're scientifically minded, try it on half your plants and compare the results.  Apply once or twice a week for best results.

Comments

[ranunculus]

I think the efficacy of urine is dependant on your garden. It is extremely high in nitrogen but has very low phosphorus and potassium. My very sandy garden is fine with the nitrogen level (lots of compost with horse manure) but horribly deficient in phosphorus. So my plants perk up and go from yellow to dark green when I apply bone meal. Extra nitrogen leaves them just as yellow or worse.

On the other hand in Ukiah (which is also phosphorus deficient) all the places that the horses pee turn dark green.

[watervole]

It's certainly low in phosporus, but not so bad in potassium (which should only be around a quarter of the nitrogen in a perfect fertiliser and is around that level in urine).

Horse manure is great stuff. I use a lot of it myself. Though, interestingly enough (given that the soil on the allotment is on a sandy subsoil) I still find I get a good result from urine.

I might try a bit of bone meal as well and see what that achieves.

I suspect different plants have different needs, but I don't know how they vary. I find the beans benefit most from urine - which is odd given that they fix their own nitrogen.

[ranunculus]

Bone meal or some other form of phosphorus might be a good addition to your urine.

I think those nitrogen fixers, the clovers and beans, do need to have a good supply of nitrogen, at least early on, to do their fixing - though I thought they were supposed to fix from the air...

Most of my garden was originally wind blown ocean sand that was buried under concrete for at least 30 to 50 years. So to begin with I had NO organic materials, no soil life, nothing. I began by digging a lot of woody material into the sand (would have worked great in Ukiah) but that just made the problem -worse- because the sand wicked the moisture out of the wood, nothing composted and I poured hundreds of gallons of water on totally unresponsive sand while the garden completely languished. THEN I realized that there were pockets of pure sand under the amendments I had put in. These days I'm just scraping off the top soil in the worst places, digging out big pockets of pure sand, or at best sandy "soil" that is almost as bad, putting the whole mess in buckets and hauling it to Ukiah to dump. In its place I'm packing in compost mixed with a little of the former topsoil. Works wonders and cuts my water bill a huge amount. As my soil recovers I may try the urine thing, but so far I'm just not there yet - after 7 years!

[watervole]

the nitrogen fixers do it via bacteria living in special nodules on their roots.

Oh heck! Woody material in poor soil is about as bad as you can get. Wood robs nitrogen from the soil as it rots down, so it lowers fertility.

That's why compost heaps should always be a mix of woody stuff and green stuff to balance the carbon and nitrogen.

If you've still got a lot of woody stuff there, then you need the urine badly as the nitrogen in that will work with the carbon in the wood and help it rot faster.

[ranunculus]

I do take your point about nitrogen and breaking compost down, in this case I think it might have been a small part of the problem, but since adding fertilizer high in nitrogen had NO effect, I'm not sure it is the whole answer. In this case the woody materials were a commercial "compost" (supposedly pre-composted) that was supposed to be amended with manure to help deal with the nitrogen problem. I remember I also added some peat in an effort to help hold moisture, which of course badly backfired. Truly, I could put my hand down in this stuff half an hour after watering and have it bone dry, even with repeated light waterings designed to break surface tension and allow penetration of the water into the soil components. Heavy mulches helped a tiny bit but ultimately soil replacement has been the key. To complicate things the substrate isn't even. In some areas there was two inches of sand, in others 14 inches. My guess is that sand was smoothed over a very pockmarked surface to level it for the concrete.

Last week I dug out some primroses that have been wilting regularly even when watered every other day (I have no idea how they survived, but they have been there from the first, wilting away). I removed the sand from under them and in the general area, packed it with compost and the topsoil and watered. Primroses haven't wilted since they recovered from transplant shock. I do a lot of my digging by hand and notice that the roots of plants rarely penetrate the sandy areas, but if there is a path will go down to the substrate which -isn't- sandy but does have Serpentine (bad) and do fine.

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

I recall when I was young in the North East, people would say the best thing for growing leeks was filtered Brown Ale. Filtered through the human body of course.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

It's also a great compost accelerator.

[decemberleaf.livejournal.com]

Hadn't thought of that. Thank you!

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

I have found myself a small nice plastic bucket for my contribution.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Well done! Let me know how the plants do.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Of course! I do have some tomato plants, they can´t recover from thise severe freezing we had unexpectadly.

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

I lack a garden, but can report that my house plants seem to like the water from my fishtank (also nitrogen and phosphate rich) when I do a water change.

I'm sure I saw a gardening/countryside programme where a guy recommended peeing on bales of straw to make compost.