Informative and thoughtful posts, Sue and Blutranes. Thank you. :) If I was the only person eating what I grow, I'd have no hesitation about adding pee to the garden. But, I give away food all summer long and well into the winter. My friends already think I'm a tad strange when I haul home 50lb bags of alfalfa and weekly loads of UCG and pile them up with leaves raked up in the park and yard waste bags scrounged from the street after dark, then cover up the lasagna layers with cardboard, paper, and burlap. They tend to look at me rather askance, when I ramble on about the crucial importance of the microherd and how to encourage diverse bacteria and fungal growth. Part of my own faith as an organic gardener is to spread the word about how it works. I want others to see and understand the process, as well as the product. When I can demonstrate the clear visible difference in soil which has been improved by organic materials -- and show the results, in increased plant growth and productivity -- I like to hope it will encourage others to try to do the same. However, if I told them I was achieving these results by peeing on my compost heaps, I think it would have a more negative impact. And I don't want to lie to my friends about what I'm doing. Or lie about what goes into the food I give to them. Like Blutranes, disclosure is a major issue for me. Perhaps if (when!) people grow more familiar with the many sides of small-scale organic gardening, folks will be more accepting and understanding of composting with pee. For now, for me -- I'd rather not piss them off. :) All the best, -Patrick

Mackel, not sure what you are on about other than you have the very common irrational fear of human effluent. I am here to tell you and anyone else that "flushing it" is idiocy on a grand scale. If you bother to look at some history what you will find is that civilizations wear out their resources by disconnecting natural cycles, like taking biological effluent from animals - such as ourselves (and since in many places we are the dominant producers of effluent) -and putting it in places where it can do harm instead of stimulating plant growth. There isn't the slightest chance that one or two people's worth of urine perpetually applied could cause enough build-up of sodium or any other element in the soil of even a few hundred square feet to be any sort of problem for plant growth. Quite the contrary.

As an environmental chemist I would be much more concerned about drugs in the drinking water than in compost or soil. Most of these compounds are readily metabolized either in the body (look at the post above, in 48 hours 95% of Effexor breaks down in to 3 other things) or in the soil. Unless you are taking huge amounts and putting all your pee in one place, it is unlikely they are going to build up enough to cause effects on the soil or plants. Compost would chew most of them up toot sweet IMHO. To have an effect on humans, they would have to 1) survive in the compost and soil, 2) be taken up by plants, 3) remain intact in the edible portions of the plant. Pretty far stretch. Now, the trace level unregulated drug cocktail in the drinking water supplies in cities taking their water from rivers that receive wastewater from other cities...THAT is a problem... I have a carbon filter on my tap. :-]

g'day maureen, had to do a google to figure what your hunglethingy was yeh just like sheet mulching/raised bed gardening/compost pile in simple terms, all recycle organic material. anyhow also did a google on your liriope stuff reckon if you pour the urine on fresh the plant would probably love it, they say if you let the urine go old more than 24 hours it goes amonic and is then a weed killer?? dunno? if you were going to use that maybe just buy some amonia and apply that? use the good fresh urine on your food trees or vege' gardens. reckon you migh take a step back and say that from the word go when you where starting your hunglethingy that is when you should have laid the kill barrier before laying any of the other material. me personally i don't know of any plant that won't cease to grow when starved of light, so a very thick layer of newspaper over the liriope after cutting it to the ground might well have saved you the hassles you now have. also as when i needed to get rid of comfry at one time i simply daily pulled any new shoots as soon they appeared the comfry died. so not sure if you can use the newspaper now or maybe start all over again? but the paper needs to be used properly to get the desired result and for persistant plants (won't say weeds because in permaculture i reckon there is no such thing maybe a plant in the wrong place but anything that grows green can be converted into food to feed the soil). now back to using mulch to kill stuff like grasses etc.,. when i use mulch i lay it around 20+"s deep, i use spoilt fodder hay or my preffered pastur grasses as mulch, i find very little comes up through that, the layer has to be a heavy/dense layer no mamby pamby fluffed up layer, like i say works for me. len mail len lens garden page