It's strange how these things happen - that is, how the sight, scent or taste of something can suddenly trigger the recall of a distant memory. As I walked through the garden tonight and looked at my tomato plants, this was precisely what happened. Of all things, the memory centered around pee - or more precisely, the use of pee as a liquid fertilizer.
As a child of the '80s, having grown up in a modest brick row house located in the Northeast section of Philadelphia, I distinctly remember that like my dad, our next door neighbor - a lovely and rather large multi-generational Japanese family, also maintained a wonderful urban vegetable garden in their backyard. While our main crops were tomatoes, miniature eggplant, cucumbers and kohlrabi, theirs' were bitter melon, watermelon and an assortment of Asian greens. One summer day, my eyes wandered over the fence and I watched as the petite, gray-haired Japanese grandmother carried a rather large bucket of pale yellow liquid out to the garden and proceeded to water her vegetables with it. When I asked her what the liquid was, much to my horror, she told me that it was pee. And judging by the size of the bucket, I gathered that all three generations must have contributed to this smelly enterprise.
As odd as this revelation might have seemed to a 8 year old, I did learn something that day. Apparently, diluted human pee makes for some good plant food, particularly for tomatoes. Furthermore, it's sustainable. If you don't believe me, click here.
So I will go ahead and ask all of you this very frank question - Do you (or would you) use diluted pee (urine) as a liquid fertilizer in your garden? While I hesitate to partake in this endeavor myself, I'm curious to learn about its potential.
Before I leave you and while we're on the subject, here is a quick update on my tomatoes:
I was good about labeling my 30 or so main crop tomato plants. Unfortunately this was not the case with my 9 early ones. This is either a Cherokee Purple or Black Krim tomato.
