Not piss poor,
fertilized with pee

September 13, 2009

Didn’t go to the farmers’ market this Saturday

One of the reasons I gave my Amsterdam kitchen garden the name Slim Pickins was to show that even a postage stamp-sized garden with a relatively little crop could serve up a surprising amount of food. But the real reason was that it had piss poor soil and I always thought the garden looked scrawny. I used to blame the slow rate of growth on the location, but visits to many local organic farms and especially to the nearby school gardens had made it painfully clear that the anemia of my produce had nothing to do with living so close to the Polar Circle. Well maintained school gardens right in the middle of the city were lush because they had great soil.

I’ll be chewing this cud all week

In the hope of increasing soil nutrients, I grew the green manures that were hugely successful in the Occitanian kitchen garden. But at Slim Pickins, the alfalfa, vetch, fenugreek and phacelia didn’t burgeon and produce huge mats of biomass like they did in the south, in a large part due to the blasted ground conditions. I’d been thinking about asking a farmer I knew if he’d bring me a load of composted manure, but I never ended up going ahead with this because I just don’t like the idea of importing large volumes of additives from afar. Searching for a solution closer to home, I considered making a worm composter and biking the castings over one recycled yoghurt container at a time, but there were already so many worms casting away in the garden that this plan just seemed bass-ackwards.

By the time I had returned to my garden in August I had basically resigned myself to a mediocre harvest. But two weeks ago I starting bumping into links about fertilizing with urine. I knew that pee was nutrient rich, balanced in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, and I had no problem with it in the animal manure. Why it hadn’t occurred to me to try using my own I’ll just chalk up to a deeply ingrained societal taboo against humanure. One YouTube video and 3 articles later and suddenly urine fertilizer seemed like a painless experiment with a material both abundant and free. I decided to give it a go. I might have even been giddy, biking over all those recycled yoghurt containers filled with pee.

Not piss poor anymore

Following instructions, in a big bucket I diluted (DILUTE! DILUTE! OK!) 1 part fresh pee to 10 parts Amsterdam tap water, gave it a stir and poured it on my soil, trying to avoid splashing the leaves. It’s possible that there was some more giddiness at this point. Recycled yoghurt containers empty, I left the garden and returned one week later.

AND…
WOWWY!
KAZOWWY!
And now with jazz hands!

Pity I didn’t make scientific-style before and after pictures but you’ll have to believe me when I say that the results were striking. In one week’s time all of the plants suddenly produced a great deal of leaf, and the leaf-colour seemed to have deepened considerably. All of the plants, but especially the climbing ones (calabas and hokkaido), appear to have undergone an enormous growth spurt. This happened during a waning moon, and with ever cooling temperatures. At home in the window box my spindly vervain and green shiso that had always resembled bonsais, suddenly filled out in their pot.

Possibly you are thinking, “Hey Nut-Job, OY VEY, what about the SMELL, what about the TASTE?” I can report that there is no urine or amonia smell at all, even on my indoor plants. (When I saw the difference in just a few days on the herbs, I had to try it indoors.) Some of the net-lit studies suggest that insects (like aphids) can taste the difference and stay away. I can’t taste … any… urine. Well, how do you know what urine tastes like? I don’t know, how do you don’t? What? I don’t know. Shut up.

And to get back to the reason I did this in the first place, the Slim Pickins kitchen garden produced a two bike-bag bumper crop and it looks like next week will be the same. I had such an abundant harvest (chard, kohlrabi, kale, cavalo nero, various leafy herbs, tomatoes, chives) that I didn’t need to go to the Farmers’ Market. Although I don’t think the folks at Organic Farm the Knotwilg will have to get another day job, the results in my garden after just one week of urine fertilizing are impressive.

In case you were planning on coming over for a nibble of some Slim Pickins goodness, I’m harvesting on Saturdays and fertilizing on Mondays. You’ll probably pray for rain.

• Urine Charge Every day we urinate away nutrients–nutrients that could grow food, fiber, flowers and even fuel! Human urine contains nutrients in the form of nitrogen, which plants love, and it’s usually pathogen free.

  Tomatoes thrive on urine diet …Yields for plants fertilized with urine quadrupled and matched those of mineral-fertilized plants. The urine-fertilized tomatoes also contained more protein and were safe for human consumption.

  A great review of Steve Solomon’s book, ‘Gardening When it Counts, Growing Food in Hard Times’ …The main issue with growing plants the biointensive way, Solomon writes, is that in addition to the extra work of turning over the soil 24 inches deep, a large number of plants growing close to each other will have an high demand for water and nutrients, made even more acute by their inability to fully grow out their root structure due to competition from neighboring plants. In contrast, Solomon offers advice and guides for growing vegetables in larger, more spread out beds that will grow (in his opinion) more robust and more nutritious food, taking a fraction of the time, water and energy needed to keep the biointensive beds running.

  Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon …Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, this book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household waste water, perhaps two hundred dollars worth of hand tools, and about the same amount spent on supplies - working an average of two hours a day during the growing season.

  Online version of the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, humanure expert

  Human Urine As A Safe, Inexpensive Fertilizer For Food Crops Researchers in Finland are reporting successful use of an unlikely fertilizer for farm fields that is inexpensive, abundantly available, and undeniably organic — human urine. Their report on use of urine to fertilize cabbage crops is scheduled for the Oct. 31 issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

  Your Crap, Our Compost: Turning Human Feces Into Fertile Soil A generally fecal-phobic society reacts to the thought with a mix of snickering interest and fearful aversion, all dispatched in a single flush. But Nance Klehm, 43-year-old urban forager and grower, transforms human excrement into nutritious soil one bucket at a time. Klehm’s Humble Pile, a local do-it-yourself human waste composting project, introduces a backyard alternative to the machine-churning, power-draining waste-processing facilities tucked away in remote locations. “I’m not treating it chemically. I trust microorganisms to do it for me,” Klehm says.
  

  Free Urea Based Fertilizer Human urine makes an excellent high nitrogen liquid fertiliser for most plants. Dilute it 10 to 1 and pour it over and or round fast growing plants once a week; like vegetables, Green manure crops and sugar cane. Indeed just about anything that you want to push along rapid green growth

  USING URINE AS PLANT FOOD TO MAKE PLANTS BLOOM - FREE FERTILIZER The YouTube video that got me all excited in the first place!

  Piss Poor, a video about the EcoSan Toilet system, recycling urine for agricultural use in… where else, Africa!

The tomato that keeps on giving

debra at 21:16 | | post to del.icio.us

4 Comments »

1. this is one hell of a story!! I never got to tell you that I have a very sweet aunt that has a huge entirely biological garden in Midden-beemster. She’s basically arming on the bottom of an old sea, so the ground is just like clay,. it’s sometime very hard. But she does an amazing job. And she knows all about what plants fight bugs in combination with other plants.
   BTW love to see you soon, are you permanently back in our chilly Northern Spheres again? Whoa!

   Comment by rob — September 13, 2009 @ 21:35

2. Ha-! Crazy.. Funny Girl… Ha Ha. I thought U would have great soil…. at least in pictures .. I’ve been all over Asia but never E.U.
   South Western Oregon U.S.A. must ROCK…! Go Little Garden Go…!!!

   Comment by Jeff Pool — September 14, 2009 @ 2:26

3. Hi Rob,

   It seems, the Beemster is the place to be, if you’re a vegetable, animal or mineral!. Please let’s get together - we could also go pay Auntie a visit or do the brunching thing. For the time being I have devoted myself to the icy north. Lots of ‘cool’ stuff going on right here in our own back yards. YIMBY Yes In My Back Yard.

   Comment by debra — September 14, 2009 @ 9:21

4. was giving your fertilising story the big up on Saturday night at dinner, discussions moving from the I pee on my lemon bush story (its always a boys story) yo the value of urine ….

   Comment by melissa — October 19, 2009 @ 0:12