My questions are: How much (approx) human urine would you add to a cubic yard of oak leaves to get it hot? With the addition of human urine, how long would it take to make compost from mostly raked oak leaves? (I don't have a lawn, don't own a mower, need lots of compost first). I saw conversation that some people age the urine before using it (not sure if using for compost Nitrogen or as fertilizer?), but I couldn't find out WHY, or what effect that would have on the compost.

I apologize for asking, I'm sure that the answers are here somewhere. I just can't spend any more time looking for them, I have tons of work to do in the garden.

com·post (kmpst)
n.
1. A mixture of decaying organic matter, as from leaves and manure, used to improve soil structure and provide nutrients.
2. A composition; a mixture.

Grass clippings have an NPK around 4- 0.5- 2 so urine has about 4.5 times as much Nitrogen as that missing ingredient. I just went ahead and added urine collected all day Wednesday to the pile, so I'll see how it goes.

The 18-2-5 numbers might be on a dry weight basis, i.e. meausuring only the solids. I'm not sure.

No reason to age urine if you're putting it in the compost anyway. Letting it sit will only result in lost nitrogen as far as I can tell. This came up the other day, and I asked that poster what they thought aging did (they referred to it as 'chelating' which is a specific chemical process but gave no info on how, why or what it was doing).

Do report back on your results!

Oak leaves are not allelopathic.

Maybe 3 to 10 parts water per 1 part urine.

You may wish to read some of Cornell's info such as the On-Farm Handbook, or extracts, which have C:N ratios and lots of other stuff.

If you live in a city, just drive around the night before garbage day. You'll find plenty of greens aleady bagged and at the curve.

I never said, and never implied that urine was going to be my sole source of nitrogen. I explained that I add coffee grounds, garden waste, kitchen waste, alfalfa tablets, corn meal, manure, soil, etc.

Eventually I will find some grass clippings. When the summer rains start the people who have lawns probably do things different because the grass grows fast. The people that I know are aware that I am looking for grass clippings, so maybe one of them will find some. When it gets too hot (soon) to spend my days working on this yard I will resume my scavenger hunt for more types of compost materials, and I will continue to add assorted materials I have on hand until the (just started) compost is finished. If oak leaves provided what my soil needs, I would already have good soil. My intent is that the oak leaves will be a small percentage of the end product.

My leaves are dried (brown, carbon) from live oak and water oak. They have a waxy coating on them and they resist decomposing because moisture can not penetrate the surface (shredding helps). Everything else in the compost pile has been added in attempts to break down those leaves, and to retain moisture in the pile, and get microbes working. The pile does usually get hot within two days, and when I turn it (and add more green stuff and add more water) I find that the leaves in the center of the pile are nicely wilted and black. When the pile doesn't get hot (for whatever reason) I find that it is a bunch of work that has little effect.

The obvious solution would be to turn the pile less often and accept the idea that oak leaves do not compost well. However, I have already seen that they can work. I don't know exactly how long I've been working at getting these leaves going in a compost, it seems like maybe two weeks? It is already smelling like good compost, and maybe about half of the leaves are well on their way. The more it decomposes the more moisture retaining, microbe infested material clings to the dry leaves. But I added more leaves the other day in the course of regular yard work, and when it didn't get hot I went to the Internet to find suggestions on Nitrogen sources that I might have around the house.

Urea (NH2)2CO is a chemical that comes from the breakdown of proteins. It is the main source of Nitrogen in urine and is excreted by the body as a waste. I could buy Urea from cow urine or I could buy synthetic Urea, or I could buy Milorganite from sewer sludge and nobody would think anything of me mixing one of these "fertilizers" with my pile of leaves. Again, that is not what I am doing... I would just add fertilizer to the leaves where they fell if I thought that would accomplish something, and it would save me a lot of work moving the leaves around.

The pile was toasty hot again today for whatever reason, but I'd like to think that the urine helped. Would urine work that fast?

You said: "I add coffee grounds, garden waste, kitchen waste, alfalfa tablets, corn meal, manure, soil, etc"

and the results = pile was toasty hot again today

Sounds like "something" is working. Don't sweat it too much unless you're planning on submitting a research paper to the farming journals :-)

Me, I pee on my pile all the time. At the beginning, when its hot, when it finished, etc.

Coffee grounds are the one thing that I found will make a difference quickly, but still you need to add the browns to those. Just adding coffee grounds won't heat you up without browns. A clipper shearer can grind up the leaves. Leaves resist breaking down when they are left whole.

You are right though. I am being paranoid about the neighbor behind me who told me (by the time I had emptied three hefty bags of leaves into a pile) not to do it, and said it was going to stink and look ugly. I need to just ignore him. His kitchen window seems to be extra close to the property line, and I placed the compost heap about 20 feet into my property, as far away from buildings as I could put it. I'm pretty sure that I'm not breaking any rules or laws, even if he isn't happy about it.

And I have been known to add very diluted, non-sudsy household ammonia to the pile -- couple times a season. Works better than urine. Kimmser may say this is a no-no. My pile is mainly fungal and too hot for worms. My worms love my raised beds.
Sunny

Saved urine equals aged urine, would you agree? Studies showed that there is very little loss of N to off-gassing if it is stored air-tight and then applied non-diluted directly to the soil just before planting, which rather makes sense, doesn't it? They sometimes even inject it like the corn growers do with ammonia gas. Whether the fertilizer value was in fact increased by aging wasn't clear from what I read. The fact remains, though, that if one wants to take maximum advantage of urine gathered during the non-growing seasons one has to store it air-tight.

The second-best option would be to sequester it in a material like chopped leaves or straw. For those of us living where endless numbers of plastic containers with tight-fitting lids are tossed away as garbage, there is no reason not to make use of them.

Don't worry about pharmaceuticals- the compost microorganisms will take care of that.

I collect in gallon milk jugs and add the resulting three quarts or so every other day or so.

Geez I can't imagine how many containers you would need to store up all your urine over the winter. I just poured whatever I collected on the stumps all winter.

Mackel

Mackel

Re: winter, I guess in MA there would be no biological action to speak of to use or fix nitrogen, so it would just leach away in the rain and snow. I agree with your approach. (not that you needed my approval!)

Urine contains large quantities of nitrogen (mostly as urea), as well as significant quantities of dissolved phosphates and potassium, the main macronutrients required by plants, with urine having plant macronutrient percentages (i.e. NPK) of approximately 11-1-2 by one study[18] or 15-1-2 by another report,[19] illustrating that exact composition varies with diet. Undiluted, it can chemically burn the roots of some plants, but it can be used safely as a source of complementary nitrogen in carbon-rich compost.[20]
When diluted with water (at a 1:5 ratio for container-grown annual crops with fresh growing medium each season,[21] or a 1:8 ratio for more general use[20]), it can be applied directly to soil as a fertilizer. The fertilization effect of urine has been found to be comparable to that of commercial fertilizers with an equivalent NPK rating.[22] Urine contains most (94% according to Wolgast[18]) of the NPK nutrients excreted by the human body. Conversely, concentrations of heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, commonly found in solid human waste, are much lower in urine (though not low enough to qualify for use in organic agriculture under current EU rules).[23] The more general limitations to using urine as fertilizer then depend mainly on the potential for buildup of excess nitrogen (due to the high ratio of that macronutrient),[21] and inorganic salts such as sodium chloride, which are also part of the wastes excreted by the renal system. The degree to which these factors impact the effectiveness depends on the term of use, salinity tolerance of the plant, soil composition, addition of other fertilizing compounds, and quantity of rainfall or other irrigation.
Urine typically contains 70% of the nitrogen and more than half the phosphorus and potassium found in urban waste water flows, while making up less than 1% of the overall volume. Thus far, source separation, or urine diversion and on-site treatment has been implemented in South Africa, China, and Sweden among other countries with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided some of the funding implemenations.[24] China reportedly had 685,000 operating source separation toilets spread out among 17 provinces in 2003.[25]
"Urine management" is a relatively new way to view closing the cycle of agricultural nutrient flows and reducing sewage treatment costs and ecological consequences such as eutrophication resulting from the influx of nutrient rich effluent into aquatic or marine ecosystems.[19] Proponents of urine as a natural source of agricultural fertilizer claim the risks to be negligible or acceptable. Their views seem to be backed by research showing there are more environmental problems when it is treated and disposed of compared with when it is used as a resource.[26]
It is unclear whether source separation, urine diversion, and on-site urine treatment can be made cost effective; nor whether required behavioral changes would be regarded as socially acceptable, as the largely successful trials performed in Sweden may not readily generalize to other industrialized societies.[22] In developing countries the use of whole raw sewage (night soil) has been common throughout history, yet the application of pure urine to crops is rare. Increasingly there are calls for urine's use as a fertilizer, such as a Scientific American article "Human urine is an effective fertilizer".[27]

Footnoted article on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine such as:
^ a b Ganrot, Zsofia (2005). Ph.D. Thesis: Urine processing for efficient nutrient recovery and reuse in agriculture. Goteborg, Sweden: Goteborg University. p. 170.
^ a b Steinfeld, Carol (2004). Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. Ecowaters Books. ISBN 978-0-9666783-1-4.
^ a b Morgan, Peter (2004). "10. The Usefulness of urine". An Ecological Approach to Sanitation in Africa: A Compilation of Experiences (CD release ed.). Aquamor, Harare, Zimbabwe. Retrieved 6 December 2011.
^ a b M. Johansson; J�nsson, H.; H�glund, C.; Richert Stintzing, A.; Rodhe, L. (2001). "Urine Separation � Closing the Nitrogen Cycle" (PDF). Stockholm Water Company.
^ H�kan J�nsson (2001-10-01). "Urine Separation � Swedish Experiences". EcoEng Newsletter 1.
^ South African city looks to turn urine into fertilizer, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, November 2010. Sanitationfinance.org (2010-11-13). Retrieved on 2011-12-07.
^ water- and sanitation-related activities of GTZ � focus on ecosan projects. (PDF) Retrieved on 2011-12-07.
^ UDD-Toilets and urine management. (PDF). ecosanservices.org. Retrieved on 2011-12-07.
^ Mara Grunbaum Shown to be an effective agricultural fertilizer, Scientific American, July 2010. Retrieved on 2011-12-07.

That link was not about compost. Nor did it contain data. Nor was it a peer reviewed study. Nor was it any kind of study. It says, "Proponents"- (democracy in this case rears it's ugly head)

"... of urine as a natural source of agricultural fertilizer claim the risks to be negligible or acceptable".

Mackel

"The more general limitations to using urine as fertilizer then depend mainly on the potential for buildup of excess nitrogen (due to the high ratio of that macronutrient),[21] and inorganic salts such as sodium chloride, which are also part of the wastes excreted by the renal system."

It appears to agree that there are limits to urine.

Mackel

Flush it, it's what great civilizations do...

Mackel

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.

Mackel

Mackel

Love,
Mackel

Also, let's be realistic: the great majority of NA currently has low population density. We can piss with impunity.

Here is a question for you: do septic systems in your neck of the woods get pumped out ever? Where does that effluent go?

Mackel

Mackel, on this thread you have made the claim that using urine in a compost pile or on soil will ruin the soil for crops. Back that claim up with some verifiable examples or admit that you have no experience in the matter and are simply talking out of your a$$.

Mackel

The Cultered Cultist