Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Milestones

The Number One Fertilizer?

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I’m acutely aware that my son’s childhood is passing rapidly. Soon he won’t fit in my arms. He’ll stop running around the house squealing, “I love you, Mama.” Hair will sprout on his toes. So birthdays and milestones can be bittersweet.

Except potty training.

Saying goodbye to diapers has brought only joy, exultation, and delight to our household.

I dreaded it. I kept hearing about different methods, videos, tutorials, and entire books dedicated to the subject. It sounded complex and a little terrifying.

My husband and I procrastinated and braced ourselves for battle. Then a few months ago, Ezra started using the potty … and the whole transition was sort of, well, anticlimactic.

What was your method, you may be wondering. What was his incentive to trade in his trusty old diapers for the porcelain throne? M & M’s? Chocolate chips? Ice cream cones? Well, not exactly, but we did strike a bargain of sorts.

I remembered “Let it Mellow”, a hilarious essay by Melissa Hart, where she relates stumbling upon her “85-year- old great-grandmother hunkered down bare-bottomed under the rosebushes.”

“Pee makes the roses bloom bigger,” she told me when I commented that other octogenarians did their business in the toilet. “Why throw away something useful when it can do good in the world?”

That’s right, we told Ezra that he could use his pee to feed our new cherry tree. He loved the idea, and for months he dutifully marched out with his potty day after day to “feed the tree”. He tired of the activity at some point, and I didn’t think much about it again … until I was out watering the other day.

The grass under this tree is at least five inches taller than the rest of the lawn, and it’s a vibrant shade of emerald. The tree itself is also strikingly healthy, vigorous … robust.

It got me thinking, why aren’t we, like Melissa Hart’s plucky great-grandmother, making use of all of this free fertilizer? So I decided to check in with Google to find out if urinating on the garden is really a good idea.

“Every time we pee, we’re flushing away a valuable source of nitrogen that we could use to fertilize our gardens,” Emma Cooper writes on Green Thumb Articles:

Urine is a sustainable source of nitrogen for gardeners. When it’s fresh, it contains very low levels of pathogens, although it can be acidic and quite salty. It needs to be diluted for use as a liquid fertilizer – at least 5 parts water to 1 part urine, and up to 10 parts water can be used.

Every adult produces between 1 to 3 liters of urine per day – enough to fertilizer around 300 square meters of plants. But if you don’t want to use it directly on plants, then add it to the compost heap – the nitrogen works as a compost activator, speeding up the composting process while adding nutrients to the compost.

The golden rules of using pee in the garden are to make sure it’s fresh. In any case, if you try to store urine the nitrogen gets converted into ammonia gas – making for a nasty smell, as well as letting valuable nitrogen escape.

Josh Peterson also explains on planetgreen.com that, “Urinating outside can save, on average, three gallons of water per water-closet visit.”

So there you have it. Apparently Ezra should have been diluting his homemade fertilizer, but the cherry tree didn’t seem to mind.

Don’t worry, you won’t stumble upon us bare-bottomed in the rose bushes any time soon, but we’ll probably encourage Ezra to continue feeding the trees and flowers. And I think I might have stumbled upon a new potty training “method”. Maybe I should create a tutorial … make a video … write a book.

I’m curious, do you (or would you) use pee to fertilize your garden or supplement your compost pile?

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Milestones

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halloween

The ducks are flying low, black vees swooping between the trees. “Ga ga,” Ezra calls as they pass. He’s toddling along beside me. He weaves into a neighbor’s yard, and I reach for his hand to veer him back onto the sidewalk

Ezra took his first solo steps this week at seventeen months old. Most babies hit this milestone, oh, about a half-year before Ezra.

He took his time, but he’s hitting it in style. Within a day, he’s toddling everywhere – down the hall, across the park, and up and down the block. And he couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

“Hi, hi, hi,” he calls to a neighbor’s cat. He crouches and picks up a leaf, then stops to examine a lavender plant, refusing to budge for several minutes. “Vroom, vroom,” he says, watching someone ride by on a bicycle.

“Where’s the ball?” He points at a pumpkin on a doorstep.

I tend to walk fast. On walks, my husband is always tugging on my arm. “Slow down. I’m back here.” And my parents call my walks sprints. I just love that feeling of striding – legs pumping, arms gliding.

But I’m appreciating Ezra’s pace right now. My favorite season is almost over. The last yellow leaves are clinging to barren branches, and they shine like pendants in the afternoon sun. The sun, itself, won’t be with us for much longer. It usually goes into hiding until about mid-February. So Ezra and I are making the most of it, ambling around the neighborhood every chance we get.

Watching Ezra delight in his first walks makes me think of my four-year-old nephew. He just got his first pair of glasses. His grandmother says he stands at the window and gazes out, remarking on blades of grass, twigs, the grain of wood.

Imagine seeing all of it for the first time.

This post is for Steady Mom’s 30 Minute Blog Challenge.