Depends on what routine you establish.
You can produce around two litters a day, so for me a half gallon mason jar works, I deal with it daily. A gallon container would give you a two day window.
Keep a lid on it to slow down the urea (nitrogen) breaking down into ammonia.
a 2 1/2 gallon watering can works great. One day’s worth of collection, fill the rest with water, you don’t have to worry about too strong a dose (nitrogen/smell/salts).
When @Lucky_P mention “human fecal materials”, I think he moved on from discussing urine to an issue about using feces as fertilizer.
The example of those diseases “are of fecal origin”.
I believe Lucky warned us about using feces as fertilizer.
Ditto. I thought he was endorsing using human urine, but not feces, at least, not any feces but your own.
I live in the suburbs, and I don’t think, “direct application” is an option, as it would violate local decency standards.
(When MA first passed a sex offender registry law, there were radio interviews with people who felt it was too broad. One was a guy who sometimes peed outside his front door when he was drunk. He said, yeah, he had a drinking problem, but he didn’t think he was a danger to children. I don’t want anyone in the household to end up on a second offender registry for trying to fertilize the garden.)
I have been wondering if i ought to try to collect the stuff and use it. But “bathroom sinks of stale pee” is not something i want to deal with, either.
FWIW, I have been using it for a few months now. I don’t store it. It’s mainly a weekend thing when I spend whole days in the yard. I just pee in a watering can, top it up with water from the rain bucket and pour it under trees/grapevines right away. Never noticed any smell. The dilution is probably 1:20.
Is sodium buildup in the soil not a concern?
Yes. I have no issue - other than salt damage - which I have experienced firsthand - with the use of human urine.
Human fecal materials - not uncommonly referred to as ‘humanure’ - are, in my opinion, a no-no. Actually, I’d shy away from most carnivore fecal materials… whether they be domestic dog & cat, their wild counterparts.
Didn’t mean for anyone to misunderstand that I was suggesting urine was a significant health threat. There is, however, plenty of documentation regarding infant mortality rates in correlation to human fecal contamination of water sources.
i use to store my urine in the shed in old 1 gal milk jugs. id have 1 under the sink in the bathroom. when full it would go to the shed and a empty would come in the house. once capped nothing could volitize out and could be kept forever to use when you wanted to. using on a pile of woodchips or similar browns helped compost it down while allowing much of the salt to leach out. much safer for the plants that way . id also saturate my raised beds with 5 gal in the fall. by spring they were ready to plant.
It was a confusing statement because he started off talking about the bacterial content of urine and instead of using the word night soil or undigested fecal matter he summed his statement as being about “humanure”. Traditional definition of manure is solid waste but common usage has expanded to any fertilizer. Perhaps I should have read the statement more carefully, but it wasn’t a topic swing I was anticipating as no one is considering using humanure as fertilizer here. However, digested human waste is widely used as an agricultural fertilizer. In fact, I’ve read 50% of human fecal matter in the U.S. is used this way.
Bon appetite!
They did a study on tomatoes.
This study evaluates the use of human urine and wood ash as fertilizers for tomato cultivation in a greenhouse. Tomatoes were cultivated in pots and treated with 135 kg of N/ha applied as mineral fertilizer, urine + ash, urine only, and control (no fertilization). The urine fertilized plants produced equal amounts of tomato fruits as mineral fertilized plants and 4.2 times more fruits than nonfertilized plants. The levels of lycopene were similar in tomato fruits from all fertilization treatments, but the amount of soluble sugars was lower and Cl− was higher in urine + ash fertilized tomato fruits. The β-carotene content was greater and the NO3− content was lower in urine fertilized tomato fruits. No enteric indicator microorganisms were detected in any tomato fruits. The results suggest that urine with/without wood ash can be used as a substitute for mineral fertilizer to increase the yields of tomato without posing any microbial or chemical risks.
google scholar has a bunch of studies.
https://scholar.google.com/
A dilution of four parts water to one part urine is often adequate. Here is some urine math to put things in perspective:
A litter of urine contains around 16.3g of urea/nitrogen (9.3g~23.3g, 16.3g median). Sodium around 2.78g (1.17g~4.39g, 2.78g median). Diluted 4:1 (4 parts water, 1 part urine, 5 litters) it can be spread enough not to cause problems with smell or nitrogen burn.
A tablespoon of Miracle-Gro is 11.34 grams. At the 24-8-16 it means it contains 2.72g of nitrogen, .9g of potassium, 1.8g phosphorous. This means that (give or take, different urines, different concentrations) a gallon of 4:1 dilluted urine contains 13g of nitrogen, a gallon of miracle-gro mix (1 tablespoon to a gallon) contains 2.72g of nitrogen.
Because a gallon of diluted urine (4:1) contains close to five times the amount of nitrogen Miracle-Gro has, you should use it that much sparingly. This would also minimize salt buildup.
Looking at the plant in my initial post, give me some application tips.
At this point Im filling up 12 oz gatorade bottles and am assuming that mixing that with 1 gallon of water would be a good blend.
How much should I apply to the plant?
Im not wanting to waste it cause I have alot of other plants that Im sure would enjoy it as well. Id hate to just dump the entire gallon on one single small plant and have it wash thru the compost sand mixture and then down into the sand underneath only to continue out and away.
Unfortunately Im only there on the weekends so Im thinking give the plant X amount Fri evening when I get there, give it more on Sat and then again on Sunday before I leave but again the question is how much?
Should I just saturate the little guy with the entire gallon to start out with or maybe I should just water it real well first with straight water, wait a few minutes and then go back and hit it with some of my pee mix?
It is hard to tell how much nitrogen is in your particular sample… 12 ounces would be anywhere between 3.3 grams and 8.26 grams on urea/nitrogen, with a middle point around 5.8 grams. At that middle point gallon to gallon it would be twice as much nitrogen as your regular mix of Miracle gro.
What plant is that? Some are nutrient-hungry; gooseberry bushes would probably try to eat you if you fall on them… There’s also the fact that during the vegetative growth phase (spring, plant is trying to grow new leaves and branches) it can handle more food than say during the blooming stage.
Because we think that the problem is nitrogen deficiency a 12oz+gallon of water mix ought to do something positive. If it doesn’t respond to that I would begin to suspect a different problem, one that even more nitrogen is not bound to fix.
like Don said. start low and work your way up. its easy to over apply but not easy to fix after the fact. in my experience, if you have a good layer of mulch around your plants already, it helps buffer the N going in initially and not as critical to get exact dosing right.
Thanks, its a che plant
I have been doing this for decades. Mostly in the back yard. If I have a plant that is yellowish in the front yard, I pee into the gatorade bottle, hanging on a string on a nail on the fence, zip up my pants and pour it on the plant in the front yard. In the hot dry summer, I will sometimes mix with water. You can really see your plants green up over a short time- a couple of weeks, then on to the next plant. I don’t eat a lot of salt so I would guess that my urine is lower in sodium.
John S
PDX OR
I just exercise my right to urinate outside in my yard where only creepers could see me. I miss living remote enough where I could pee out my front door in the morning.
I hold a license in wastewater treatment. I never waste my urine. I half a half gallon plastic picture that I fill with water after going in it. It’s a great fertilize just done use it straight and spread it around. If you have a dog you can see the green spots were they go. If they go the same place they will kill anything that isn’t rather large.
i still do it off my front deck in the wee hours. screw em’! 
This topic and threads like it come along about once a year. If you need proof how well urine and poop work, I wish you could see my yard. Even though my dog has a very large area he could go to the bathroom, he always goes within the same roughly 10 ft x 10 ft area in my backyard grass. He does both his business there. It is absolutely astounding how thick and tall the grass is in that area compared to the rest of the yard. We’ve all seem little spots where a dog pooped grow taller and greener, but when a dog goes in a 10 x 10 area for a couple years like mine has, its just mind blowing.
On the human side of things, I wonder if you saw that movie “The Martian”? Matt Damon gets stranded on Mars and is able to sustain himself by using the low-nutrient marts “dirt”/sand and mixing it with his human waste and growing a potatoe plant in each spot. Really cool thing. (yes, I know its a movie and in reality it wouldn[t be that simple- still its a neat idea that might work with some other factors applied)
I pissed into a 12 oz can, mixed that nto a gallon of water and poured onto plant.
Did this Fri and Sat evening.
Maybe I won’t see any results this weekend when I go there but I’d assume that if I did the same thing this weekend I’d see some changes by the following weekend.