Here's the study. Surendra K. Pradhan was interviewed on CBC radio this week. Discussing the benefits of urine as a fertilizer, on public radio - it's a new day. He suggested a time lapse of a few days between applying the urine and the wood ash, to avoid ammonia offgassing. By coincidence, or intuition, we've been tossing urine and wood ashes, and occasionally manure, on our scrubby roadside wild rose hedge in hopes it would grow and help block the sight and sound of traffic. The hedge, which was growing virtually in gravel, is now three times the height and breadth it was ten years ago, blooming beautifully, and admired by visitors. It's maybe not surprising that so much groundbreaking R&D on waste-separating toilets and waste as fertilizer is coming from northern countries like Finland and Sweden. My sister-in-law, an outpost nurse in rocky northern Canada, says heaps of disposable diapers can be seen in the brush around communities from the air as she flies in - there's nowhere or way to bury them. Here is a link that might be useful: study

We go through 6 cords of firewood a year. I fill a 3 gallon bucket of ash every 7 - 10 days with ash and bits of charcoal. I live on alkaline soils. Where I throw it depends on the prevailing weather conditions on that day - if its dry, windy, and a serious fire risk, I put it in a hole in the ground. If there is snow all over the place, like now, I give the bucket a heave with the wind and scatter it all over the snow. If the compost heap is covered with snow, I toss it on top. We've done this for years and years, and the people who I bought the property from did it for 20 years before that. The 3 ft dia hole where, over the years, dozens of ash buckets have been dumped, is surrounded by dense, lush grass, with an oak tree about 6' away, no ill effects at all. The only time I have ever had any ill effects from putting ash on anything was last summer, when the ash from "mesquite charcoal" turned the lawn where I dumped it pale for a few weeks. Anyway, this is a recurring theme on this forum, those who dump ashes think it doesn't do much harm and may help, and those who have never dumped ashes swear it will ruin your soil. :-) Slash and burn agriculture has been around for thousands of years, for what thats worth. Coal ash is something else all together, and pretty nasty stuff.

You will be making a toxic sludge for the following reasons: 1) Chicken manure is very high in N and you need a high-carbon ('brown') material like leaves, sawdust, straw etc. to balance it out. Otherwise it will smell of ammonia and worse. 2) A lidded container will keep out air which is essential to an aerobic, non-stinky pile. 3) A plastic container will also hold water and not allow drainage, which can contribute to smelly conditions as well. It's a recipe for disaster. However if you have room for a plastic container, you have room for a similar sized woven wire cylinder on the ground that you could pile it into. Hide it behind a bush if appearance is a problem. Even w/o browns this will be better than a plastic container with a lid. If you can get some browns to layer in, it'll work even better.

Michael357, I have irrigation water as well, coming from a mountain river. During the summer, its not that bad - but in the winter, when the river is really low, the irrigation season is over and its just treated, domestic water, the hardness increases significantly and we get calcium deposits on all the plumbing. The problem we do have in the area are the salts leaching up from the sub-soils with flood irrigation - in fact this winter, I'm working on removing one of my vegetable gardens where the leaching has pretty much rendered the soil white with salt, and its getting iffy to grow vegetables at all - I'll level it and plant grasses. I do worry about micronutrients, and try to keep the garden supplied with copious amounts of compost - I am seriously pondering doing a trial with one of those trace mineral supplements - but that would be more a replenishment of well-used, shallow soils. As for ash on the soils, I, of course, don't throw it in the same exact place year after year, but try to fling it around - the exception would be the pit mentioned above, where I dump gallons of ash during times of fire danger, and again, the grass around that pit is the thickest, greenest, healthiest in the yard, and the nearby tree certainly doesn't mind. This ecosystem was torched, pretty much annually, by the Native Americans for eons, which led to the development of the open Ponderosa forest, and down where I am, the pinion cedar forest. Fires were suppressed, and in 2002, during our extreme drought, we had some massive, slate-wiping forest fires that left an inch of so of ash all over the place - shattered rocks with the heat kinda fires. See those areas now, its all lush, green shrubbery and grasses. I've posted in other threads about hose-washing the ash from charcoal grilling out of the grates and off the concrete patio and into the lawn, directly adjacent to the concrete patio, where it impacts the first few inches of lawn time and time again, all summer long, for nearly 20 years now. I see no difference, although the few times I tried "Mesquite" charcoal, it did turn the grass yellow for a week or so. And then it recovered. So again, for those with wood ash and are hesitant, I'd try using some in an out-of-the way place, and see for yourself the effects. For me, the areas I throw the ash are the earliest to green up in the spring, and are noticeably darker green for the first few weeks of the summer.