Using urine to decompose cardboard
Fertilizing
our house plants with urine seems to be working great, but once
Mark
started bottling his pee, I realized that we had too much of a good
thing. What to do with the extra?
Urine is so high in
nitrogen that one of its best uses is mixing
with high carbon compounds to create a C:N ratio more suited to
decomposition. Although I use large
cardboard boxes for kill
mulches as soon as we get them (sometimes emptying out components
early
to get to those important boxes), small cardboard boxes tend to pile
up, waiting for a use. Time to see if we can compost them with
pee!
Following the lead of
someone mentioned in Liquid Gold,
I filled a plastic bin with cardboard, making sure that the cut ends
all faced up. By laying the cardboard vertically in the box
rather than horizontally, I made it much more likely that urine will
soak down into each layer and get to work rather than puddling in the
top few layers. I didn't want the cardboard to get waterlogged,
so I figured I could either put holes in the bottom of the bin and put
it outside, or leave the bin intact and move it out of the weather, and
I chose the latter. The final step was to pour a gallon of urine
over the cardboard. I'll try to remember to check on the bin at
intervals and pour on more pee if the cardboard seems dry, but
otherwise I'll just leave the decomposition chamber to do its thing and
report on the experiment in six months to a year.
| 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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"...antipathy for some of my stranger permacultural experiments..."
This makes me realize how lucky I am. Not only does Mark put up with me, he even provides me with pee...
I think your hole full of cardboard would be a great idea. Or just put it in a compost pile and pour the urine on periodically. I can already tell the difference in our compost pile where I've been throwing the extra urine.