Using urine to water house plants
The
first place I wanted to use urine was to fertilize my nitrogen-hungry
dwarf potted citrus trees. Our movie star neighbor has the
most
amazing dwarf Meyer lemon tree anyone has ever seen, and he attributes
part of his success to regular doses of miracle grow. I'm leery
of chemical fertilizers and wondered if urine would work as well.
For my first attempt, I
ignored
instructions and poured straight urine
around the roots of my citrus trees, washing the pee in
with plenty of water. I thought the mix-in-the-pot technique
should work, but the plants complained, so my next trial consisted of
mixing urine and water in a bucket at a proportion of roughly one part
urine for six parts water, then using that mixture on the plants.
This time, the plants were pleased.
In fact, our dwarf Meyer
lemon was so pleased it popped out in
literally hundreds of blooms! Now, from my vague understanding of
the bloom-decision-process in fruit trees, I think the number of
flowers must have been decided before I started pouring urine around
her roots (although I'm not positive about that.) The real test
will be how many of those flowers she sets into fruit since my
experience has been that our Meyer lemon drops a large percentage of
the young fruits soon after blooming. I have high hopes that
giving her plenty of nitrogen during that critical fruit-setting period
might help us keep a higher percentage of fruits this year and get a
bumper crop of lemons next winter. As the old saying goes, "If
you've got urine, make lemonaide."
| This post is part of our Urine in the Garden lunchtime series.
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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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