Scientific American: Pee on Your Beets!

[Bumblebee]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-urine-is-an-effective-fertilizer

Definitely organic :-)

[LiberalFighter]

1. beats should be beets

[Bumblebee]

2. of course. sorry about that. a typo.

[amerikat]

3. Beets taste like the soil smells

I love that, love beets.

Urea is well known fertilizer that we mostly flush down the toilet.

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. Yup! Beets contain traces of the substance that does make the soil smell

the way it does - also, the smell just after a summer thunderstorm. And some varieties are "earthier" than others - making them a bit more love/hate (the variety Chioggia).

The compound is called geosmin.

From Wikipedia -

"The "earthy" taste of some beetroot cultivars comes from the presence of geosmin. Researchers have not yet answered whether beets produce geosmin themselves, or whether it is produced by symbiotic soil microbes living in the plant. Nevertheless, breeding programs can produce cultivars with low geosmin levels yielding flavours more acceptable to consumers."

[amerikat]

6. I hope they don't breed that out of beets. for that is why i love them.

I like my lunch straight up.

The new mods may take this as a sex thread. the beet goes on.

edit for spelling

[NRaleighLiberal]

wearing my garden hat in this thread! tomatoes are my thing typically

I grew beets successfully this year for the first time - used transplants instead of direct seeding. they were great! we especially loved the greens.

[amerikat]

10. I way over planted tomatoes.

3 prime time
3 cosmonaut velkov
3 Amish paste
3 mortgage lifters
2 black krim
8 unknowns or volunteers from last season.
oh my......tomatoes by the bushel.

mostly going to the food pantry or the WIC program.

feeding our community, one garden at a time.

[NRaleighLiberal]

11. I've grown most of those. My claim to fame - having named Cherokee Purple.

And a few others - Cherokee Green, Cherokee Chocolate, Lucky Cross, Little Lucky. You grow heirlooms for 25 years, you find interesting things!

Of those on your list, I like Mortgage Lifter (for the flavor) the best - but I have pretty bad disease issues in my Raleigh soil...

We donated 2000 tomato seedlings to two big community gardens. Eating local - great stuff! Keep up the good work!

[amerikat]

12. can we get some seeds from you...will reciprocate in kind.

Our high school has a green house. would like them to sprout all of our seeds.
We could do without diseases brought in on plants from big box stores.

[amerikat]

13. The prime times that I got from a local tomato expert

have me amazed by the output......none are ripe yet......
and i have not bought a tomato yet......i'll wait for my own home grown.

[Warpy]

5. It's also a good growth medium for nasty bacteria

so the best idea is limit its use to things that will be cooked.

[Igel]

18. That it is.

However, if you dump the yellow water before it goes bad the soil bacteria vastly out-compete the nasties (that, and some of the nutrients are fairly quickly bound--our soil is mostly clay and nitrogen poor).

One usual rule of thumb is to not fertilize for 2-3 weeks before harvest, and rinse as you normally would.

The other is to dilute the stuff.

I was worried about runoff, but I tested it on the yard. The grass wasn't growing quickly and was yellowish before fertilizing. Even a fairly pure strip of the stuff poured onto the ground 30 minutes before a storm yielded a fairly tight strip, with a 2-3" band of decreasing grass height on either side. Some of that blurring is going to be because of how the grass roots are distributed.

If you eat a fair amount of meat and not a lot of veggies, the nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium numbers are badly skewed though, something like 20-3-3. A lot of the nitrogen doesn't actually stay in the soil--it's metabolized and winds up in the air. Which, to be honest, is precisely what happens at wastewater treatment plants, but without the waste of water used to flush or the chemicals used.

[Bumblebee]

7. Obama apparently does not like beets

I don't think they made it into the WH garden. Too bad.

[customerserviceguy]

8. In the garden?

No wonder my significant other is mad at me for what I did at the table a few nights ago... :(

[amerikat]

9. What did you do?

What?

[customerserviceguy]

16. It's a joke about peeing on beets!

[aquart]

14. A nurse once told me "Urine is a sterile substance."

And I believe her.

[Orsino]

15. Well, it's supposed to be.

When it's not, you've got trouble in River City, friends.

[skoalyman]

17. Heck I knew that every time I'm in wallmart I visit the produce isle

;-)