How can I reuse or recycle menstrual blood?
In honour of International Women’s Day on Monday, we’re having a week of women’s & sexual health themed posts (and giveaways!!). Check out our older related posts too – such as unused disposable sanitary products or end-of-life menstrual cups.
I thought long and hard about whether to feature this because it’s the type of green action that makes Daily Mail readers exclaim “bloody hippies!!” and pledge to not reduce, reuse or recycle just to annoy us filthy, poor Good-Life-wannabes. But in the end, Cipollina’s comment yesterday convinced me – it’s not for everyone but blood is a cracking fertiliser.
The fluid emptied out from your Mooncup or pink water from rinsing out from your washable sanitary towels is a great source of natural nitrogen – it replenishes overworked soil and feeds the plants. People buy blood meal — the dried & powdered blood from livestock — as a non-synthetic fertiliser but why not cut out the middle man/middle cow? It’s as organic as you are.
There are some potential problems with just pouring it straight on the garden – some blood-borne pathogens can be transferred around and apparently it can attract ants – but one way to minimise the risk of that sort of thing is to put it through a hot compost heap. If you know you have a blood-borne pathogen, you might want to look into the situation with your condition further – although apparently even hepatitis, one of the longest surviving blood-borne pathogens outside the body, only manages about 30 hours before breaking down (shorter if heated/exposed to sunlight).
I found two very interesting discussions on the topic – this one and this one – explaining about different people’s experiences and methods but I wonder if anyone has used it for anything a bit more out of the ordinary…
Thoughts? Ideas? Suggestions?
Here’s my personal take on these things.
They sell powdered blood (bones and horn, too) as fertilizers, and even artificial and not-so-artificial pee. Oh, and shit in pellets! But why cross the river to fetch our water when we can compost and use our own body wastes? In our own gardens?
Let’s not panic. It’s not the pathogens that represent the worst danger when using your own wastes in the garden – it’s all the chemicals, the hormones and shit we put in our foods, our supplements, and our medicines. If you’re on birth control, don’t do it. If you’re on stereoids, don’t do it. If you’re on antibiothics, don’t do it. These things won’t do *you* any harm, or you’d have noticed already, but may be devastating for your garden’s ecology, its flora & fauna.
Even with these possible risks at our doorsteps, there are worse things to be worried about. Much worse. Look up The Humanure Handbook on the net and search for a small piece – a little bullet list – titled “Pathogen Alert!”. No, the human body wastes and what they might contain aren’t what we need to be worried about at all. You’ll learn a lot from the rest of that book, too, by the way!
You know, put in perspective it’s actually pretty ridiculous to be worried about putting stuff in your own garden that you minutes before actually carried around *inside* your own body, don’t you think?
I’ve used my mooncup and pad blood for years on my garden and it noticably thrives more than my neighbours- she keeps asking what my secret is and i am too embrassed to say…so i just say i use blood and bone meal!
Actually, for the same reason human excrement can be dangerous. iT can harbor many dangerous bacteria, worm larva and such. They might eventually catch up with you or your family. However, so are the medicines we put in our bodies.
In ancient times all of the human discharge products were used to benefit plants, including female squirting fluid.