MiracleGro VS Pee: Which Fertilizer Is Better? Surprising Results!

what's happening gardeners it's Sunday April 16th and it's a beautiful afternoon here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina and today's video is a video that many of you have requested over the years and I'm finally going to do it. to compare two

fertilizer

s and let's see

which

one is

better

Miracle Grow or pea, yes I'm serious, if you are new to the channel, subscribe and press the bell to receive new video notifications and visit our Amazon store. Extended links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and custom designed clothing and other equipment, your support is greatly appreciated over the years, many of you have mentioned that human urine is a great source of

fertilizer

and although I have always known to be true, I have made videos about this in the past and seen the

results

with my own eyes.

I've never really considered it on par with a real fertilizer, just more like maybe something a little more. I might add, but what if we actually compare it to real fertilizer? As an engineer, I always love a good experiment, so I did some research according to the Veganic Agriculture Network. The ratio of NPK in human urine is approximately 11 parts nitrogen, one part phosphorus and 2.5. Potassium parts Consulting the website lowimpact.org they have very similar proportions: 11 nitrogen, two percent phosphorus, four percent potassium and finally, according to the Stockholm Environmental Institute, they set the NPK proportion at approximately ten one four , so

surprising

ly all these sources look quite similar.

NPK Ratios To develop a fair comparison between human urine and real fertilizer, we need to compare it to a synthesized fertilizer because there are too many variables with organic fertilizers that are derived from Whole Foods, so we will use Miracle Grow all-purpose 24 816 but we'll use it at half strength because it will be 12 4 8,

which

is very similar to what all these websites agree is the NPK ratio of human urine, so we'll have a fair fight if we do this. To make sure we're as fair as possible, we won't be buying pre-packaged potting mix because almost all of them have outside fertilizers added to them and will ruin our

results

, so we'll use one of these coconut core bricks. as a base for our medium and then we are going to cut it with old perlite, so all we are going to use is perlite and coconut core, which means that there will be absolutely no usable food in this mixture and it will be the only fertilizer for our plants . get is what we are going to give you now, we are going to compare two different types of plants, one with green leaves and one with fruits, to be fair, because human urine is mainly nitrogen, so we want to test it on both types of plants because they have different NPK demands to see what it's actually made of, so first we're going to use this giant Caesar lettuce that I started from seeds.

I have two seedlings here that are virtually identical, so we're going to take them out and grow them in containers and the fruiting plant we're going to compare them to is this hot pepper plant. It has very high yields of smaller fruits, making it a perfect candidate for a container-grown pepper plant, so we are going to use this as our fruiting plant to see how well these various fertilizers can stimulate flowering. The containers we are going to use for our lettuce plants are one gallon nursery containers and I am afraid they are too deep for one plant per container.

It will be too much mix and they could be susceptible to root rot, so I made sure to fill the bottoms a third to half of the way with equal amounts of rocks, that way I won't put as much medium in there and it will still have excellent drainage. , then the peppers will be grown in these containers that are identical, they are from two palm trees that I bought a year ago and that were exactly the same size. Now it says the weight is 1.72 gallons, which is true gallons, so this means it's probably a commercial gallon number two or three, so they're going to be exactly the same for the two pepper plants, so let's put two bricks of cocoa kernel in a wheelbarrow and we will use hot water to help speed up the hydration process, then we will add a good amount of perlite to help increase drainage and now, while our potting mix hydrates and cools, we will need to collect our fertilizer samples outside, collecting the Miracle Grow sample.

It is very easy, all you have to do is take a hose and an empty jar and fill it halfway with water according to the instructions that appear on the back of the Miracle Grow package, we have to give our outdoor plants a concentration of a tablespoon and a half. of mix per one and a half gallons of water, so one tablespoon per gallon, since we're trying to achieve half strength, we want to give them half a tablespoon per gallon, which will be exactly half a tablespoon or seven grams, so get seven grams precisely on the scale and now that we've achieved seven grams or exactly half a tablespoon, we're going to pour that into our container, so we're going to make sure to shake our concentrate thoroughly so that everything is soluble in water.

The fertilizer is completely dissolved and after it is completely dissolved we are going to fill the rest of the gallon watering container because that will give us the half strength concentration that we so desire, so this will be our control fertilizer, which It has half the concentration. Miracle Grow All Purpose has about an NPK of 1248 and this is the human urine sample that took me three days to collect and as far as human urine goes I think it's the best there is. I am not taking any medication. I cook. all my own food, I eat predominantly a Whole Foods diet, almost nothing processed and it's been in my sun room to ferment for the three days, so I think as far as urine goes, this is like the gray goose of urine, so now we have our two. fertilizers, we are going to test it by potting our plants, so I transplanted the experimental plants.

I chose practically identical seedlings. I placed them in an identical mix and in same size containers and then after they were all planted I watered them with rainwater from my Rain barrels only, no fertilizer there. I didn't want to compromise the experiment, so this medium is as inert as possible and the seedlings are as equal as possible, so that's how this experiment will go. I have one pepper and another. lettuce called pea and I have a pepper and a lettuce called mg for Miracle Grow, so while these seedlings are young, I will give the two peas a half cup of urine plus a half cup of rainwater from my water barrels to Give them basically the half feeding and then the Miracle Grow ones will get half a cup of Miracle Grow concentrate and half a cup of rainwater to dilute it further because since they are young at this time, they may not take very well. strong fertilizers and I don't know if the urine is going to burn.

I don't have much experience with this. As they get older, I'll increase it to a cup and a cup each, so we'll increase the quantity. concentrations, but they will still receive the same amount of doses and I will feed them once every weekend, whichever day it is not raining, Saturday or Sunday, because I do not want to remove the nutrients from the containers because the containers are completely inert once the nutrients are washed away there's nothing left in them so I want this to be as fair as possible so I'll start with the pea. I can't believe I'm doing this except anything for science and then I'm going to fill this up to half a cup with p let's spray this on the roots and then I fill the other half cup up to the middle line it's going to go on the lettuce again Put the lid on and take it out. from here then we are going to dilute it with half a cup of rainwater and then half a cup of rainwater and we are going to do the same with the Miracle Grow shake that half a cup half a cup half a cup of rainwater half a cup of rainwater now i have the newly transplanted plants that have just been fertilized hidden in the shade behind my garden cart because the hot afternoon sun is too harsh on the fresh transplants so i want to keep them in the shade for a day until they have time to take root because it is very stressful to be transplanted, so I will keep an eye on them.

I will fertilize them every weekend like I already said I was going to do and I will check on them periodically and see how they are doing, unless we are fertilizing them they will not get anything but rainwater for my rain barrels or from the house faucet , so they will get exactly the same water, no variables and I really have no idea what to expect. this experiment so it should be very interesting to follow this and see how it goes it's Sunday April 23rd and it's time to do another application of fertilizer it's Sunday April 30th and it's time to fertilize our plants again and you're starting to see a clear difference emerge on the different plants, but overall I'm still pretty impressed, the lettuce looks almost identical, you've got the pea lettuce here and then we've got the Miracle Grow lettuce here and they actually look so good to each other right now.

The pea lettuce looks a little greener and I would have thought you would see the lettuce perform more evenly because lettuce primarily needs nitrogen. I'm seeing a clear difference emerge in the pepper plants, although peppers do need a more complete fertilizer, so you're seeing. the Miracle Grow pepper is starting to take off compared to the pea pepper, however things could change, maybe it's just nervousness while the plants are young, so we'll feed them like we've done well, it's Sunday, May 21 and I'm officially putting an end to this human urine as fertilizer experiment because I've collected all the data I can.

At this point, I'm going to show you exactly what I'm talking about, so right here you can see the Miracle Grow lettuce and then You can see the lettuce head with human urine and you'll notice that the Miracle Grow lettuce head looks pretty perfect, it's filled everything in. the container, there's really nowhere else for this head of lettuce to go if I let this get bigger, I could sell this at a grocery store, it actually looks pretty cool, lettuce with human urine on the other hand, I want to say that it clearly grew, did very well for a short period of time, kept exactly pace with the Miracle Grow lettuce and then developed all these deformities and it doesn't look so good anymore, it's not very full, I mean, it's still completely edible, there is nothing wrong with it in terms of eating, but you can definitely see that they are not equal in terms of quality. that every quote-unquote fertilizer produced here is the two pepper plants, as you can see, things didn't go well for the human urine pepper plant, while the Miracle Grow pepper plant could be sold at a Home Depot or at a minimum at Bonnie's booth.

Why are they charging like thirty dollars for a single plant now? But I digress. Whatever it is, it's crazy. Both plants did very well for the first two weeks and then this one started to slowly wilt and go into decline and now it looks like it probably won't make it, so over the last few weeks I've been able to watch the plants I was fertilizing with human urine They slowly developed deformities and went into decline and began to not look as good while at first they looked just plain. as good as the plants I was giving Miracle Grow to and I was trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

I thought maybe I just didn't design a good enough experiment. Should have had more controls. I should have had three or four of each plant, this is not a large enough sample size. So I thought, well, maybe I was just burning the plants with human urine and I sat there and I was trying to figure out what was going on and I think about you guys a lot. You may not want to hear what I'm thinking because I wanted to believe that human urine is a fantastic fertilizer, as many of you claim, but I think what's happening is that fertilizers like Miracle Grow are specifically formulated to have a lot of different properties. micronutrients in them that support the biological processes of a plant, while human urine definitely contains NP and K, which are the macronutrients and can make plants grow.

Growing human urine clearly lacks many of the micronutrients that plants need to grow, so I think what started happening was because I used a completely inert medium in the cocoa and perlite core where there were no micronutrients at all an Once the outer seed coat was naturally digested and all those micronutrients that come packaged in the seed coat were gone and the plants used them, the plants started developing all these deformities because while they were getting NP and K they probably weren't getting boron, manganese, sulfur, magnesium or some type oftrace micronutrient that helps. in their proper development that was put into Miracle Grow, so these are healthy plants because they were getting npnk and all the essential micronutrients for life, but in this inert medium once the seed coat was gone and all those initial micronutrients in the seed.

When they were depleted I started getting all these plant deformities and I think it's something very simple like lettuce that thrives primarily on just a handful of micronutrients and nitrogen, held up much longer and grew much

better

without all the micronutrients than something super complex like a fruiting pepper plant that needs a lot more nutrition and a lot more micronutrients than a simple lettuce, so I think the pepper may have exacerbated the deficiencies in human urine and the fact that there just aren't enough micronutrients to use as a stand-alone fertilizer now If I had used a potting mix previously fortified with fertilizers or planted them outside in my garden in real soil that has the micronutrients organically and used human urine, these deficiencies probably would not have appeared, but that is exactly why I wanted to use this medium. inert.

I wanted to be able to find out if human urine is really a complete independent fertilizer. I didn't want any of those variables in there and I think the answer to that question is a resounding no, you can't just use human urine, you'll have to supplement that with other types of fertilizers or at least compost and mulch and a lot of Organic Matter that is It will slowly break down and give those micronutrients to the plants. You can't just grow it in Coco core or peat moss and perlite or some other inert medium because the plants won't get what they need, so I think I'm going to give this lettuce a shot of real fertilizer.

I'll give it some Miracle Grow and that will probably clear up the micronutrient deficiency and I'll be able to eat this in a week or two. I think it's probably too late to say let's save the pepper plant, although I'm sure this is not a perfect experiment. I think my reasoning for why it turned out the way it did is sound and logical. I could be wrong. Maybe it just has design flaws. I'll try it again next year with an improved sample size where I'll use two out of three of each plant, but I wanted to show you the honest results of this.

I thought about deleting it because maybe I made a mistake by not posting them. results but it wouldn't be fair. I think my explanation is valid and will at least give you something to think about and I hope you found the video a bit funny and entertaining too and there are my honest results on the Human Urine as Fertilizer Experiment. Do I think human urine is fertilizer? Yes absolutely. I think it's clearly a fertilizer, but it's also clearly not a complete fertilizer, so if you choose to use human urine as a fertilizer, look at it more as a component. like blood meal, that would be where you basically add nitrogen, but it's not a complete fertilizer in itself, so if you're doing things like composting and composting and maybe adding other granular all-purpose or water-soluble all-purpose fertilizers fertilizers here and there to provide the other trace micronutrients that plants need.

I think human urine can be used to reduce costs, but it's certainly not the end all be all. They should all be one-size-fits-all products. I hope you found this video useful. and you also found it a little fun and entertaining if you did, make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel and ring the notification bell to get notified when we post more videos like these if you're curious. Any of the products I use in my garden I generally have them all linked Below in my Amazon store in the video description, so expand the video description and click the Amazon link to see everything I use in the real life and while you.

They are already there, check out my distribution store for custom products if you want to support the channel. Thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see you all again in the next video. Daily's on its long lead on the beach. Oh, there you go, go look. Yeah, he's going into the water, he doesn't know what to do, he's actually going into the water, this is a breakthrough, man, oh, it's so good, put it down. Dale is enjoying another beach vacation and it's a beautiful day, thank you.