Jim Haddix sent me a great URL today about using urine and wood ashes as a fertilizer. According to the Finnish people who did the study the mixture works like gangbusters. It's at http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/food-crop-fertilizer-features-gulp-human-urine/story?id=8517396 . I have one question as to it's merits and that relates to the fact that the Urine turns into Urea after two months of storage. Urine I can understand but Urea is a a huge question mark. If Urea will destroy any pathogens in the urine then what does it do to the friendly bacteria we need in our soil? You can go the the local coop and by Urea based fertilizers but they are hot as hell, mainly used for corn which is a big eater of nitrogen. But do they kill the little fellas in the soil that we want to be there? I will try to find out. I do know the building out in Oklahoma that got blown up was done with a Urea based fertilizer. That stuff is mighty powerful. The Finns did a study on how well the urine/wood ash fertilizer did on tomatoes. And lo an behold my buddy Tater Joe from Idaho sent me a tomato post today. Here it is.
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Tomatoes are the rage this week!
The family members who have the small farm have been waylayed by illness, so the wife has been up there tending to the Chickens & Tomatoes.
So, today is super home canning day for a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes.
She is canning whole tomatoes, tomato paste, spaghetti sauce, lasagna sauce, you name it!
My job is to clean the jars prior to canning, and again once they are done & cool while checking seals. I also write the labels, label the jars and enter information in a master logbook.
No wonder people readily accepted the commercially canned foods when they came out, this is a helluva lot of work!
EM-Joe Canning in Idaho!
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This food production business is labor intensive, to say the least. There is more work than our little gang can get done here in the valley. Of course, if the web-bot is correct and we are going to have a world wide famine that will kill a billion people then there will be PLENTY OF GARDEN HELP. It will surpass Baseball as the national sport. George Ure had the reminder up on http://www.urbansurvival.com/ for Thursday, 9-10-09.
I was just listening to http://www.howestreet.com/ and heard a John Rubino interview that he finished with announcing that a company in Germany had created a nano-technology paint that will turn whatever you paint with it into a photo voltaic panel. This stuff is getting interesting. I tried to go back to the interview and hear it again but they had taken it down. A little fishy there. Stay alive.
Michael
mboone@rtccom.net
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2 comments:
Human urine (and probably animal but I forget) only contains about 3-4% urea, whereas urea fertilizers are nearer to 40-50%.
Photovoltaic paint, now there's an idea! No wonder it "vanished"...
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