Carol Steinfeld's Liquid Gold presents a wide array of methods to use urine in your garden.  Since urine has a C:N ratio of 0.8:1, it is far too high in nitrogen to be used as a straight fertilizer in most instances or you'll burn your plants.  Instead, dilute one part urine in three to ten parts water, at which concentration urine can be used like a chemical fertilizer.  However, keep in mind that diluted urine has all of the same pitfalls for disrupting soil microorganisms as other chemical fertilizers do, and use it with care.  The only place that I would feel comfortable applying diluted urine directly to our plants is our potted citrus since they crave nitrogen and are too isolated from the soil to get their full nutritional requirements from compost.

In my opinion, a better use of urine is as a high nitrogen source to round out your compost pile.  You can simply pee onto a big pile of wood chips, leaves, sawdust, or a bale of straw turned so that the cut ends go up, and you'll have a smaller but richer pile of compost in six months to a year.  One experimenter put a lot of cardboard vertically in a plastic container and filled the container with urine, ending up with rich compost in a year.  For a lower work option, Carol Steinfeld recommends peeing directly onto woody mulches (three or more inches deep) around your trees and shrubs --- the high carbon mulch will mitigate the high nitrogen urine and your woody plants will get a slower meal.

For those of you with small city gardens (or who want to pee in the bathroom and forget it), you might consider building a graywater bed.  Channel the urine from a urine-diverting toilet in your bathroom to a garden bed with a layer of sand and pea gravel on the bottom topped by good garden soil and plants.  The urine filters out through holes in the bottom of the pipe while air comes in from the other end of the pipe to keep aerobic bacteria happy.  Replacing the sand and pea gravel with bales of straw captures any urine leaching away and provides high quality compost, but you have to turn and rebuild this type of bed once a year to add in new straw bales and take out the excess compost.  For best results, consider diverting laundry water or other graywater into the bed to dilute the urine.

Be aware that using fresh urine to grow your own food is pretty safe since you can't give yourself a disease you don't already have, but if you find a way to collect a whole community's urine and apply it to your farm, you'll probably want to sterilize it first.  The simplest way to sterilize urine is to store it in a sealed container for six months.  (Don't let air come in contact with the urine or a lot of the nitrogen will turn into ammonia and escape, which smells bad and also lowers the nutritional quality of your pee.)  For added safety, apply urine to crops where edible parts don't touch the ground or wait one month after applying urine before harvesting the crops.  The absolute safest way to apply urine is below the soil surface (such as in the graywater beds in the last paragraph or by drip irrigation) since a healthy soil food web will make short work of any pathogens that might happen to be present in your pee.

This post is part of our Urine Fertilizer lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Liquid Gold Urine: Waste or fertilizer? What is in urine? Using urine as fertilizer in the garden Homemade urine diverting toilets

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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