Gee Whizzzzz -- It's Soooo Easy (and Free!) To Fertilize Your Backyard Garden!

You may not like the sound of this -- I'm talking about bodily fluids, after all. Urine to be specific. Since we're all adults here, there's really no need to snicker to yourself. It's just a fact of life -- a harmless warm liquid that every living, breathing creature naturally excretes. Our bodies generate nitrogen-rich waste compounds that must be filtered out and secreted by our kidneys into that all too familiar mellow yellow liquid. Composed of water, sodium chloride, urea, uric acid, creatinine and ammonia, the average person produces approximately 40 to 60 ounces of the stuff in just one day. And we flush it down into a watery vortex of oblivion multiple times a day. Doesn't seem very Earth friendly, does it? Surely there must be something practical that we can do with this natural and constantly replenishing resource?

Have you ever proudly scanned your landscape thought that all of those Home Depot fertilizing chemicals you bought must be doing the trick? If you seem to have perpetually happy shrubbery and cheerfully perky flowers, chances are that they're thriving for a very different reason. While you're snuggled up like a bug in a rug during the midnight hours, foxes and many of Mother Nature's other nocturnal critters are relieving themselves all over your plants. That's right, and oh what a relief it is. Amazingly, they've got the right idea whether they realize it or not because the top ingredient in urine is NITROGEN, a substance that plant matter thrives on. So...what if we were to follow their lead by abandoning our porcelain thrones and assuming the position behind a tree (or...ahem, in front of a fence)?

It's really not as gross as you might think. As a habit, little boys and their chest-pounding papas mark their territory (unbenowst to the women in their lives) at any conceivable opportunity that they can get. It may be a rite of passage that just never gets old, or simply just a convenient excuse to draw fun little shapes in the dirt or snow. Getting ladies to take the plunge might be a bit more challenging (and messy), but these statistics might help. Just two short years ago, the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Kuopio in Finland found that urine-fertilized cabbage plants grew infinitely more lush, leafier, sturdier and healthier than their conventionally fertilized counterparts. Go onto a hundred different online gardening forums and green thumbs across the world will concur. Apparently a vast spectum of veggies, flowering trees, shrubs and practically everything in between rises amid the presence of a golden shower, too.

If you consider the more "civilized" alternative, commercially produced fertilizers are guilty of generating a high volume of greenhouse gases. The energy required to mine phosphorus along with the industry's nitrous oxide by-product (which is 300 times more detrimental than carbon dioxide output) makes it an environmental no-no. Since nitrous stores are anticipated to be fully depleted within 90 years or so, fertilizing alternatives are needed and the one thing we've all got a lot of is, well, urine.

Before you start worrying about food contamination issues a la peanut butter or spinach, bear in mind that you're not squatting in the middle of your garden and letting go. Finnish scientists believe that people following Western diets have a very minimal chance of pathogen transfer and beside that -- there's a special technique to ensure an extra-added layer of protection. The key is to fertilize your garden soil during the seedling stage -- 4 to 6 inches away from the stem -- by following a dilution ratio of one part urine to 2 parts water. So, direct whiz-to-plant contact is ruled out -- you might just want to pee in a watering can instead. Just be sure to stop mellow-yellowing your veggies at least one month before veggie-picking time. Don't use the excuse of groundwater contamination, either -- you can take comfort in the knowledge that there is just as much of a risk of that occurring with commercially-produced fertilizers as there is with human urine since they both contain the exact same volume of urea. Wow, so many pluses -- what are you waiting for? There's never been a better reason to get your eight glasses a day!