Is cat feces a good fertilizer for my roses? Or any other type of plant?
That’s about it for my question, any of you horticulturists out there care to respond?
Short answer is “no.” Carnivore feces are not considered to be advantageous for gardening and in the case of catshit you also have the risk of toxoplasmosis to consider. Any manure you use for fertilizer should be well composted, as using fresh poop of any kind will tend to kill off your plants due to the high ammonia content and the heat of decomposition. Also, fresh herbivore poop tends to have undigested seeds in it which can lead to pernicious weeds in your flower beds. Rabbit and chicken poop are very good for composting, and will make your roses go insane. Another good trick for roses is to bury a fish at the roots–but stand back! My dad buried a four foot long pike under a climbing rose and the damned thing grew all the way over the roof tree in one season.
I’m wondering where you might aquire enough to have it be usefull. I have four cats and my weekly harvest is not even a pound I imagine. You have access to a large quantity of cats do you? I can only imagine how many pounds it would take to fill a dump truck. Perhaps a 3 or 4 acre farm to start and see how it goes from there.
Just a home owner here. I’m not a horticulturist.
I have a rabbit, and a bunch of roses I’ve been thinking of Gaslighting. She goes in a litter pan, filled with about a half inch of CornCob Crumbles (sounds like they’d stay crispy in milk, no?), and her once or twice a week litter changes yield a good amount of not-so-heavenly scented waste.
I’ve always dumped everything in a bag and sent it off with the cat litter … but I can do better? Can it go straight on the ground? Straight *in *the ground? Dump it on the leaf-quasi-compost pile in the back? Does it have to ferment or cure or crystalize or whatever happens to compost before I can use it? How much can you add to an area? Is there any worry about predators getting wind of her scent and staking my begonias? What happens if I feed it after midnight or get it wet?
Wow, it’s about time the rabbit started earning her keep!
It’s nitrogen (from the ammonia and urea) that burns plants. Rabbit manure is fairly low in nitrogen, so you should be safe applying rabbit droppings directly over the plant. Be careful, though, if you’re taking them from the litter box…if they’re soaked with urine, there will be all kinds of nitrogen involved. Only use dry droppings that haven’t been sharing space with rabbit pee.
I attended a presentation about composting recently and the speaker said that cat and dog shit is no good because commercial pet food has things in it that are bad for plants. She didn’t elaborate on specifics, but she seemed pretty well versed on the topic.
If cat poop was good for gardens, you’d hear a lot fewer gardeners grumbling about feline visitors. Alas, it mustn’t be, as all gardeners I know shoo cats away.
They shoo the cat’s away because cats dig when they poop, to say nothing of stomping on and occasionally chewing plants. I challenge anyone to find scientific evidence that either dog or cat poop is not perfectly good fertilizer. It may not be as good as herbivore fertilizer because it doesn’t have the roughage but it does have N, P, and K which is what fertilizer is all about.
Nitrogen at appropriate concentrations doesn’t “burn plants” but some forms of nitrogen do which is why you have to compost chicken manure but don’t have to compost rabbit manure. As for urine, it is OK in dilute form when applied to the root area, not the leaves. (It’s used this way by some orchid growers.)
The claim that “commercial pet food has things in it that are bad for plants” sounds like complete nonsense but I’m willing to learn differently if someone can tell what what it is that in pet food that is good for pets but bad for plants.
Their are potential toxoplasmosis and echinococcosis issues with cat and dog poop, respectively, and they are probably the best reason for people who don’t know what they are doing to not bother composting them.
If you already have a pile of leaves and other dry stuff out there, adding fresh wet poop and other “green” stuff will help the compost heap ignite a bit and work faster. I’ve had good results taking three wooden pallets and wiring them together to form an open box, then layering the compost alternating dry and wet stuff in the box. Cover it, keep it in the shade and let 'er rip. When it’s calmed down and is no longer hot it’ll make excellent compost for whatever part of your garden you wish to put it in. There’s no upper limit to how much compost you can put into your soil, save making huge hills I guess.
I grew some scary pumpkin vines for many years in a small area where we once had a rabbit hutch–fifty foot long vines and monstrous pumpkin production. Rabbits is the universe’s little salad accelerators!