Urine: the pros and cons of free fertilizer

btw, I <3 Banksy

If you think you're going to get all judge-y about my unconventional gardening methods, you really shouldn't read this post...

I have dogs. So when I first started really gardening, I had to try and convince them not to pee on all my plants and veggies. I've mostly succeeded. Except around the lemon tree. They really, really like to pee on it, under it, near it.

I decided I was not going to win this battle, and I needed to just figure out a way to work with the situation.  I immediately went to the internet and tried to find a weird crackpot work around. The internet being what it is, I found a crackpot solution immediately. Actually, the website I found was about organic lawn care and how to deal with yellow patches in grass from dog pee. This person's solution was to just leave the pee be. His argument was that urine is filled with nitrogen and is actually a great fertilizer. The only problem is that it's too strong, so that's why it turns your lawn yellow. His recommendation was to simply put a little sawdust or something nitrogen-poor over the pee spots to mellow out the urine. 

I love lazy solutions.

I decided to just let the dogs pee all around the lemon tree. I didn't even add sawdust because I read that that lemons actually do like lots of nitrogen. I do have some hay around the tree, but that was just because I wanted a thick mulch to better conserve moisture between waterings. 

For a while, the lemon tree looked great. This was the happy time, when I felt all smug about my method. The tree was growing like crazy and there were a TON of lemons ripening on the branches. Then last week the down side of my method came crashing down.

 

You may recall in a previous post, I mentioned that I know nothing about pruning. So lots of branches heavy with lemons seemed like a good thing. That was a poor assumption on my part. A huge branch snapped under the weight of all the growing lemons and took a quarter of the tree with it. 

There's no real way for me to know how much nitrogen the tree was getting, but I'm pretty sure it was too much. Fruit trees really don't know when to stop. If you keep feeding them, they'll just keep growing until they crash under their own weight. That's the downside of the free pee method: you're basically peeing in the dark.

I think I'm still going to let the dogs keep peeing under the tree. I don't really want to bother retraining them. I do think I will start using nitrogen poor wood chips as a mulch though, to mitigate some of the pee. And I think I really need to get a book on pruning.

-J

P.S. I also read that pee is great for your compost. Some people recommend peeing on your compost pile to give it a bump. But I haven't done that yet, because I have low fences around the yard.