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Phil: Hey guys itÕs Phil from smilinggardener.com. If you havenÕt checked out my free online
organic gardening course, you can do that right on the homepage of smilinggardener.com.
Today I am talking about homemade fertilizer, now I donÕt mind buying the occasional fertilizer
for my garden if I know itÕs gonna really help and prove garden health but I also really
like to use fertilizers that I can make or scrounge from around my property because itÕs
a lot more sustainable and itÕs free and so today I am, what I am gonna be doing is
sharing just two, there are many different things you can use but what I want to do is
focus on two that pretty much everyone can use in their garden.
The first one is urine and I know it sounds kind of crazy but this is a really important
one, so here is some of my urine which I know is really gross for a lot of people but I
want to make an important point here, by the way molasses is also really good in the garden,
but today I am talking about urine. Urine is nontoxic, and actually urine is not really
all that yellow, may because of the sun yellow today but if you are drinking enough liquids
urine becomes much more clear but I really want to get across is that if you are reasonably
healthy person, urine is not toxic and I am gonna show you that by pouring some on my
hands which probably gross some people out and I apologize for that but what I want to
show you, you can drink urine if you have to, not something I am really interested in
doing but urine is not toxic, itÕs not a place where all of your toxins go in your
body. Urine is such wonderful stuff, I have read
that it basically has on an average I am sure varies a lot but somewhere around 11 g of
nitrogen, 1 g of phosphorus, 2.5 g or potassium and I am sure has other nutrients that your
body didnÕt use as well especially if you take supplements and multivitamins, you may
have heard someone say you are just peeing all of that money into the toilet, thatÕs
not entirely true, you get some of it but you do pee some of it, so thatÕs gonna be
in here too. So, itÕs a very nutritious thing, of course
itÕs a little easier for guys to sprinkle a little bit of urine around in the garden
here or there or maybe talked away in a private spot. One reason why itÕs really nice to
put a compost pile maybe in a corner somewhere and you can go and pee in there because itÕs
really great to do in the compost pile but otherwise what you can do is, I mean you can
pee right in the garden too, otherwise you can pee in something like this and then you
can go and use that to water your plant. Now if you are watering your plants directly,
you want to mix it with 20 parts of water, so yeah 20 times as much water as urine but
otherwise you can go pee right in your soil and on your mulch around your plants without
too much trouble. The best thing to do would be to flush your toilet out into your compost
pile or into a wet land you have created to handle all of that and to recycle all of that.
One of the main problems there is that many bylaws donÕt allow for that but if you live
in a place where you do itÕs a great way to just recycle all of that stuff and bring
that nutrition into your garden instead of sending it into the sewer system.
I did some math once and I am not sure how accurate it was but I figure that if you just
peed or applied urine to 10 square feet of garden twice a year, you are applying a lot
of the nitrogen needs of the garden. I am not sure exactly how accurate that is but
I figure I mean if I pee on each of these trees one a month thatÕs plenty of nitrogen
for those trees. So thatÕs urine, itÕs not gross, itÕs totally awesome, so start peeing
in your garden. The next thing on my list that pretty much,
anyone can do as long as long as you have some grass clippings and some weeds around,
itÕs great something called a herbal tea and what you do is you take all these herbaceous
plants and put them in a bucket with water and ferment them for a few days to a couple
of weeks. Any kind of weeds and grass clippings will do, itÕs specially nice if you have
some nutrient accumulating weeds such as dandelions are pretty good, comfrey, yarrow, stinging
nettle. I donÕt have most of those though so I just use whatever I have.
I do have a couple of legumes, vetch, and clover, which I also like to include but I
have, something I have most is just this garlic mustered which I donÕt think is the most
nutritious weed but of course it has nutrition in it. I have grass clippings, they have nutrition
in it. so all of those can go in there and what this does is it gets the nutrients off
the weeds. It also gets the beneficial microorganisms off the weeds. We put in here, we ferment
them and so it becomes this kind of fermentation like you to ferment yogurt or beer or something
like that and it becomes this kind of nice tea, we can apply to our plants.
Now itÕs entirely optional but if you happen to have any kind of microbial inoculants like
EM which is what I use often and bio-stimulants like rock dust, some kelp, sea minerals, any
of that stuff I often talk about, you can put them in there and you donÕt have to because
I am trying to make this a homemade video, you donÕt need that stuff, but it just makes
them even better tea, dandelions and some oats, some garlic mustered, a bit of vetch
and clover, a bit of grass clippings, water, water, now that is full of water I need to
cover it because this is more of a fermentation that I want to do without air. I donÕt have
a lid but this is actually kind of cool because if I put it in here I can push down, it will
spill some of the water but I am making sure there is really no air in there now and I
am just going to let this ferment for a couple of weeks.
might smell a little bit but if I keep it covered it should be okay. If you have a lot
of weeds, you can do this in a much bigger bucket too and then when are done after a
couple of weeks, you can just water your plants to give them a nice amount of broad spectrum
nutrition and some beneficial fermenting microorganisms. So those are two of my favorite simple, everyone
can make a homemade fertilizers. If you have any questions about homemade fertilizers you
can ask them down below, if you havenÕt signed up for my free online organic gardening course,
you can do that down below and you can also join me and my sister over on Facebook at
facebook.com/smilinggardener. My 2 Favorite Homemade Fertilizers That Anyone
Can Make