Pee on Your Trees!
At a young age I established several hard-and-fast rules for myself: I will never wear a suit to work, I will never turn down a free meal, and if given the choice I will always opt to pee outside rather than inside. Living in the very center of the sixteenth largest city in the United States has made that last dictum a bit difficult at times, but so far none of my neighbors have said anything about my habits. My view: what’s the point of owning a house if you can’t pee off your own front porch?
What used to be a simple declaration of freedom has since evolved into an integral part of my urban farming life. The most important element in growing your own food is creating and maintaining healthy soil, and good soil needs a proper balance of carbon and nitrogen. The earth seems to have a much easier time accumulating carbon. It gets nearly all it needs from decaying leaves and rotting wood. It’s far more difficult for it to attract enough nitrogen. Commercial farmers remedy this situation by bombarding the land with expensive fertilizers, but natural gardeners know there is a better way.
One method is is to grow nitrogen-fixing plants such as clover, indigo, peas, or beans. These plants effectively pull nitrogen out of the air and send it into their roots. The presence of such plants will help all the other plants around them to flourish. Another way is to make a nitrogen-rich compost and add it to your soil. Fish scraps and cottonseed meal are especially rich in nitrogen with a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 4:1 and 5:1 respectively. At 7:1, chicken manure is another great source of nitrogen, which is just one more reason to raise a backyard flock. But perhaps the best source of all is human urine. That’s right, pee!
At a ratio of 0.8:1, human urine is nearly 90 percent nitrogen, comparable to what you’ll find in chemical fertilizers you buy at a store. It is estimated that Americans excrete 90 million gallons of pee a year, enough nitrogen to fertilize 31,962 acres of corn, but instead of treating our vegetables with it we flush this valuable resource down the toilet (along with potable drinking water, I might add). If this makes any sense, someone please explain it to me.
Remaining true to my beliefs, I’ve been peeing in my backyard ever since I bought this house. I’ve taken particular delight at aiming my stream at the base of the little Mexican white oak I planted in the the summer of 2006. The picture at the top is of Zephyr standing in front of the oak tree. It’s a little hard to tell, but the top of the tree is just over his head. Now here’s a picture I took yesterday of him standing in front of the same tree:
My boy has grown a lot over the course of the last year, but the tree has nearly doubled in size! Yes, it gets ample sunlight and has good drainage, but more than these factors combined I credit the power of my hops-laden pee! [Warning: if you choose to adopt this fertilizing technique yourself, be warned that urine is strong enough to burn leaves and kill plants if applied to the same area over and over. Pick different spots in your yard or dilute it with some water.]
Tags: fertilizer, urine