here’s a nice article from Scientific American posted on July 23, 2010 about the wonders of pee. when it comes to your garden, you don’t need to just rely on store-bought fertilizers, because you’re in charge! (urine charge!)
Gee Whiz: Human Urine Is Shown to Be an Effective Agricultural Fertilizer
Researchers say our liquid waste not only promotes plant growth as well as industrial mineral fertilizers, but also would save energy used on sewage treatment
USEFUL URINE: Human urine, which contains nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, can be used to fertilize plants, scientists say.
FLICKR/John.E.Robertson
The beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew were perfectly lovely: round and hefty; with their skin a rich burgundy; their flavor sweet and faintly earthy, like the dirt from which they came. Unless someone told you, you’d never know the beets were fertilized with human urine.
Pradhan and Heinonen-Tanski, environmental scientists at the University of Kuopio in Finland, grew the beets as an experiment in sustainable fertilization. They nourished the root vegetables with a combination of urine and wood ash, which they found worked as well as traditional mineral fertilizer.
“It is totally possible to use human urine as a fertilizer instead of industrial fertilizer,” says Heinonen-Tanski, whose research group has also used urine to cultivate cucumbers, cabbage and tomatoes. Recycling urine as fertilizer could not only make agriculture and wastewater treatment more sustainable in industrialized countries, the researchers say, but also bolster food production and improve sanitation in developing countries.
Click here to see the full article.
