A good while back I got talking to an old man in a pub in Salford in Manchester, he told me how he always peed on his compost heap once a week to help breakdown the rotting matter. This got me curious and I researched its gardening uses a little more and found out that it was a valuable source of usable nitrogen that can be mixed with 8 parts water to 1 part pee and used as a plant food.

My pee is mainly used in the back garden but I also use it to keep my compost bins lively at my allotment plot. The ecological implications for not using our pee in the garden are alarming to say the least, an adult produces between 1 to 3 litres of urine per day, and this is enough to fertilize around 300 square meters of plants over a growing season.

Many toilets use between 50 and 100 litres of clean drinking water a day to flush away our pee, Excessive levels of nutrients in our effluent systems leads to the growth of algae. Algal bloom causes the death of plants and animals throughout our waterways.In terms of having a positive personal environmental impact, using your pee in the garden saves in the region of 36,400 litres of good clean drinking water per year, whilst at the same time stopping all of that nitrogen in your pee from polluting the rivers and waterways, which instead is used to help us grow healthy and abundant plants and improve the ecology of an area as opposed to destroying it in another.

A great book on this called Liquid Gold can be found here:

Steve