Got A Bad Case Of Steamroller

I have all the emotional maturity of an eleven-year-old. Ew:

Human Pee With Ash Is a Natural Fertilizer, Study Says

That sound I just made? Heard only by dolphins. What's this, then?

The scientists fertilized several groups of greenhouse tomato plants: one with human urine and birch ash, another with commercial mineral fertilizer, and another with just urine.

Plants fertilized with urine and ash yielded nearly four times more tomatoes than nonfertilized plants.

This compared favorably with commercial mineral fertilizers, which produced roughly five times as much fruit as nonfertilized plants.

To the team's surprise, urine alone produced a slightly greater yield than those of urine and ash together.

But the urine-and-ash plants became larger than the other groups, and they bore tomatoes with significantly higher levels of the nutrient magnesium, which is key for bone, muscle, and heart health, among other biochemical functions.

Recently, I took a gardening class. That endeavor wasn't entirely successful in that it took me an hour to figure out what we were talking about and about a minute to realize the topic would never apply to my gardening. After that, there remained 59 minutes of listening for useful bits of information and sucking down as much coffee as my kidneys would allow. Gardening instruction is often abstruse and assumes that the student knows both nothing and everything the teacher knows, so I was surprised to learn something simple and useful: when planting nightshades like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, put a spoonful of epsom salt into the hole first and the plant will develop better roots. Good roots might've come in handy this year. Even so, no one at any point in this gardening class suggested fertilizing with pee. I bet there's a pretty specific way it's done so no one gets cooties. Speaking of cooties, let's just get this out of the way:

A group of 20 taste testers ranked tomatoes grown by all methods as equally tasty.

Breathing through the mouth...two...three...four...Okay, then. Final specifics:

Urine can be collected from eco-friendly, urine-diverting toilets. Or farmers could just collect their pee in cans.

The researchers estimate a single person could supply enough urine to fertilize roughly 6,300 tomato plants a year—yielding some 2.4 tons of tomatoes.

The farmer would just need to give plants ash three days or more after applying urine.

Once again: this summary assumes both that the reader knows nothing and everything the farmer knows. Perhaps you've had conversations like these:

You: My stomach is upset and tooting like a trombone.
Helpful Friend: Mint will help that.
You: Mint what? How much? What kind? Applied where?

You: How did you grow such enormous pumpkins?
Enthusiast: I milk-fed them. It's old school.
You: You watered pumpkins with milk?
Enthusiast: No. Yes. Sort of.

You: My house is so haunted my cats look like someone ironed them standing up.
Serious Person: Get some sage.
You: Am I decorating or cooking?

Helpful hint: do not braise your cats if furniture is rearranging itself. My point here is not that people do not know what they're talking about; it's that people teach and explain so poorly in general that where fertilizing my food with human waste is concerned I might miss my cue to be nauseous, and in no way is nausea a better late than never scenario.

Turns out, peeing outside is not just old news, it's some folks' new habit and a money-saving proposition. There's even a Facebook page for PeeOutside.org. One commenter pees into a bucket of sawdust. One says add a teaspoon of baking soda. How the outdoor animals would react if the garden beds of suburban neighborhoods smelled like human pee? I have to give this some thought. The idea of accidentally tipping over a bucket of Pete's pee in the basement fills me with dread. On the other hand, who am I to argue with people who walk it like they talk it?

Well, that's a good question too because Pete keeps talking about putting a composting toilet into a downstairs closet, but he's kidding. I think he's kidding. He may already be planning for our well-fertilized future.