At the moment my poo pans are dumped on a screen to drain the urine. The cages that are set up using the design described on the New Setup thread separate the urine and the manure from the beginning. All my cages will eventually use the new setup. The point of all this is that every few days I end up with a bucket of urine and I was wondering if there is any use for it? Are there trees or plants that would benefit from direct application of urine around their base? Could it be dumped on a compost pile? Could it be dumped into my septic system as a bacteria boost or would it be too much at a time? Maybe this is pushing it a bit but if I can get good use from any byproduct of this little operation it would be a good thing.

Urine is high in nitrogen. I would suggest diluting it with water (may 1 part urine to 2-3 of water) and using it on your garden. You could pour it into the compost pile, but I think much of the nitrogen might be lost that way.

Thanks Maggie. I might actually have a garden this year so I might try that. There is an excellent Extreme Composting thread on HT and they would pee on the compost piles to add nitrogen to the pile, that's where I got that idea from, just looking for input from people here.

I could just pour it out in the back field but in the spirit of recycling and trying not to be wasteful I figured I would toss the question out there.

Waste not, want not.

That's one of the reasons I use peat moss in my poo pans. Not only does the peat moss keep the urine smell down, I can dump the whole thing into my garden and get the benefit of all of it.

So when you do it that way, the urine doesn't burn your plants?

It shouldn't. The peat moss soaks up the urine, and then breaks down and releases the nitrogen gradually.

We bought land that had been used as a corn field for the last umpteen years. It simply had no nitrogen left. I'd planted a few things, nothing was really growing except a row of corn. ONE row. Just the stuff near the "house" (we weren't living there full time, just Mike out there working on putting up the big shed). I was wondering outloud one day about this single area of corn and he says "oh, I've been peeing on them to help with nitrogen".

Apparently it was something his dad had told him when he was little and he'd never forgotten it. All I can say is..it worked

(where's the TMI smilie when you need it?)

One of the 'new' bits of information that the lcoal Extension office released last year is this,-- if you can smell the ammonia, you are losing the nitrogen.---

It is recommended that you cover any nitrogen source so that it stays in the soil. Of course, a compost pile should absorb any full strength urine quite quickly, but if you make a hole, dump the urine, then cover, you should be set to go-- as for right into a garden, dilute it so you do not get the burning effect and can make it go further. The extra water wil also help get the nitrogen deeper into the soil where it really needs to be.

Nitrogen in soil is such a,"Here today, gone tomorrow" thing that many extension offices don't even bother to test their own soil samples for it. If you take in a sample of your own soil they will test for it rather than try to explain why not. Virtually the only stable nitrogen in the soil comes from soil organisms which produce it in small but steady amounts. For that reason I always use urine on the compost pile for faster break down and add the compost to the soil to keep soil organisms active. You may get a quick boost on plants with the application of diluted urine but the effect will be temporary. Organic matter in the soil to feed the soil organisms is the only stable source.