Maybe it will help your mission to have some examples to show it’s not just the one-off orchardist peeing into containers – to diffuse the disgust.
No mountaineer in the alpine wants to get out of their warm sleeping bag in the middle of the well-below-freezing night, or the middle of a raging storm to be snowed on peeing. So, gatorade bottle bottle to the rescue. It just becomes the normal thing that’s done… and you even start to think it’s a great idea of ease, and mountaineers sometimes kidding it would be easier to do this at other times, as well. Some climbers see it as a good source of heat and want to throw it inside their sleeping bag, but a gatorade bottle isn’t necessarily so secure, so those folks tend to use a Nalgene water bottle. However, with the Nalgene, one always hears of the (true) story where someone grabbed the wrong ‘water bottle’ in the middle of the tent-dark night…
Huh, I don’t pee in a bucket, I pee into a plastic gas container. What’s the deal?.
The point is to provide trees with a quick release form of nitrogen. What a waste to squander this resource into the compost pile. It might make it decompose a bit quicker, but I doubt it would benefit the trees as much if you are looking for rapid response- particularly in spring when the soil is still cool.
People are disgusted by many things they aren’t used to, but gardeners usually have some tolerance for bad smells, and nothing smells worse then when I turn my compost pile. Actually the worse is when I release my compost from their poorly draining garbage pails, I deliberately do the first phase this way to keep it form rodents- when I dump the pails the contents are too disgusting even for rodents. But the anaerobic red worms fill up those pails. Once the contents are in a more aerated environment, typical earth worms take over. Those same red worms dominate muck soils.
I think that most people aren’t all that disgusted by their own pee- the trick is to water it in or apply right before rain. I need some polling data on this.
If you are an older male chances are about 50-50 that your sleep gets interrupted by the need to pee. The less of an interruption you make it, the less your sleep is disrupted. A container by your bedside is helpful.
I know that cycle. Maybe the acceptance issue is keeping the big red gas can next to the bed. Maybe something more discrete would be accepted better… lol.
I don’t know how sexist the comment was. But there are women more inclined towards that sort of thing. My mom for one will pop a squat in front of anybody. Her moto is ‘wherever you be let your pee flow free.’ It used to embarrass me as a child. As an adult I couldn’t care less. You do you mom.
Not most, that’s very true. I count myself among those squeamish types. But as a child of the hippie revolution my parents were not. I suppose it’s true what ‘they’ say, a child must rebel.
In my experience, surface application of N (alone or in mix) will de- nitrify without full effect in anything below 60f. Incorporated in furrow there doesn’t seem to be much loss in expected growth when ‘buried’ earlier, as for potatoes. On grassland, one of my favorite sights each year is the vibrant green that appears every year when soil temps hit that critical 58-60f. Some years it’ll come on all of a sudden with just one warm rain. An old textbook told me that’s what happens at 60.
My best guess is that when synthetic N is buried in the presence of sufficient organic matter, it combines with it, limiting oxidational loss before the plants can take it up. That’s how the organic N cycle works too iirc.
As far as academic psychology goes, your experience is well supported. Women on average have higher trait disgust, particularly what they call core disgust, which has to do with pathogen type stuff, urine being a good example.
So, regardless of anatomical inconvenience, woman are just less likely to be okay with dumping untreated, unaged, non-sanitized human waste and bodily fluid on their food.
I’m not much inclined to do that either, although urine generally doesn’t need to be “sanitized” even by those rare people who believe in drinking it as a health cure. It isn’t how we spread disease- but I assume you know that.
Lumping urine with feces under the term “body waste” is not very helpful in encouraging people to put their urine to good use. The solid stuff must be sterilized through the composting process.
With 8 billion people on this planed it’s probably about time we figured out how to put both body products to better use.
While I will readily concede that feces and urine are in two different classes of hazard, I’m still ok with calling both human waste, as that’s the most appropriate term, and of treating urine with the same degree of suspicion and disgust as we treat blood, semem, and other bodily fluids.
As far as the ecological or efficiency consideration goes, I’m a lot less concerned about N than things like P, K, or topsoil. We can easily convert air to N, and excess N is fairly easy to control, unlike leached P or eroding topsoil for example.
But anyway, my only original point was about women being more reluctant to directly apply human waste as fertilizer.
IMO, your thinking is erroneous. It’s like lumping tomatoes with deadly nightshade. I’m not here to argue, I’m here to offer advice. For all practical purposes to the gardener, human feces is a completely different subject as far as incorporating it into the garden than urine. However, different personalities react differently to the subject, but if using urine disgusts you, why participate in a discussion of its use?
I’m not going to touch the semen subject as an object of disgust or otherwise. However, blood meal is a fine source of organic and relatively quick release nitrogen and can double as a very affective deer repellent.
Digested sewer sludge can also repel deer and offer nutrients to plants, including a low percentage of slow release N, but it tends to be loaded with heavy metals as I understand it, so may best if only used for lawns and ornamental plants.
The reason urine is sometimes pasteurized is fear of it being contaminated by feces, which seems like not a very likely thing to happen if collection is done with a bit of caution. I’m talking about individuals in their own gardens and not big farms that sell produce.
Incidentally, my use of urine in my vegetable garden stops well before harvest and I apply it to the soil and not to plants, even though I wouldn’t consider it very dangerous.
But I did say feces and urine are in different classes as far as hazard goes, we agreed on that point.
I did say that urine is similar to other bodily fluids though. It’s reasonably to use the same degree of caution with urine as with blood, for example. Yes, on average, the properly collected sample of either is basically sterile. However, poor collection or in case of infections, both can be contaminated with fairly serious human pathogens. So they warrant similar levels of caution.
Fresh blood, fresh semen, fresh lymph fluid, or fresh urine are all probably safe in most cases, but the odds of a contaminated sample increase with the number of samples, so if it’s a common practice, it’s not actually that safe.
I feel like I should clarify that I’m not really disgusted. I just think the juice isn’t worth the squeeze so to speak. Nitrogen is cheap, it’s easy to manufacturer and a renewable resource, and it’s pretty easy to manage ecologically, unlike phosphorus for example. If urine was a great source of phosphorus or potassium, or was good at rebuilding topsoil or something, it might be worthwhile. But for N? Nah, not worth the risk. If you must use it, just compost it first. If it’s worth using it dangerously, it’s worth composting. If it’s not worth composting, then I’d submit it’s not worth the health risk fresh.
Agreed. Treated properly, human waste is something we could stand to use much more. It’s a real shame most of it just ends up in rivers, especially given how much ecological harm it causes there and the fact that the P, K, and micros in it are not renewable.
It’s a renewable resource when it is taken by plants from urine, not so much when natural gas is used to extract it from the atmosphere.
The reason there is so much interest in using it as fertilizer all over the world is partially to keep it out of our streams and rivers.
“In the US, the nutrients in urine often pass through wastewater treatment plants and into rivers, lakes, and bays. Once in the aquatic environment, excess nutrients (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus) can cause harmful algal blooms (HABs). HABs are destructive to aquatic ecosystems in a number of ways.” from Rich Earth Institute : Environment
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