So you're trying to make a bomb and you want our help?

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

I just knew that would be the first post and I still have to ask. BTW, no - I want (well okay SHE wants) to build some raised garden beds using straw bales. One of the things that needs to be done to prepare the bales is apply about 1/2 solo cup of 33-0-0 fertilizer per bale per day and then water the crap out of them. The idea is the nitrogen will cause the bale to break down faster than if left to it's own devices. Apparently bales are the bomb for tomatoes and peppers!

Urea - 1.32g/cm^3

So, if you have 32.5% urea and 67.5% water, you'd have about 430g of urea per litre of solution.

ETA - of course, you could always just take the mass of the solution for a specific volume. Knowing water is 1g/cm^3, 1L of water should be 1kg. The mass difference is your urea mass. Of course, this is a bit of a simplication but will certainly give you a decent estimate.

If you want better, determine the volume created when you mix 1L of water with your solute. Find the mass of the new solution and find the density (will be >1g/mL). Then, your mass of urea per litre will be mass of urea dissolved divided by solution volume.

Shane

wait! are we back to believing in chemistry again?

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Thanks!

I'm disappointed as well. These liberal pursuits like chemistry are a gateway drug to climatology, public health care and ultimately LGBT rights. Avoid this science book learnin' before you too catch the gay.

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Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

But in case you are really interested in book learnin'

This is a solution of 32.5% v/v of urea in water

Urea has a dens = 1.32 g/cm³
Water has a dens = 1.00 g/cm³
(we're assuming STP for both)

using a basis of 100ml:

32.5 ml of urea = 42.9 g of urea
67.5 ml water = 67.5 g of water

42.9g of urea, with a molecular mass of 60.06 g/mol, gives you approx. 0.714 moles of urea per 100ml solution.


Jokes aside, don't try to make homemade explosives. If you can't do these basic chemistry calcs you probably are not lab savvy enough to safely experiment with potentially dangerous materials. Also, If you've been searching for ammonia and nitric acid on eBay you have already come up flagged on several Homeland Security lists.

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Remember - It's important to be comfortable in your own skin... because it turns out society frowns on wearing other people's

Thanks for that, I'm just trying to figure out the application rate for getting bales to heat and break down for gardening. The nice part is that is already in liquid form and I can apply it either with a siphon sprayer & garden hose or a pump up sprayer. The real issue is the application rate, if I over do it the bales will be basically baked and unusable for longer than our short growing season.

https://pubs.ext.vt.edu/...424-035/424-035.html


BTW, the stuff I'm considering is commonly called diesel exhaust fluid, basically pure urea mixed with purified water.

Too much science, not enough tractor. I thought you were a fellow redneck?

But since your going so sciency... design me a watering system for a garden of you choose by you choose with veggies that you choose that will only use 1gpm of very hard water full of h2s. It can run 4 hours at night and 4 hours in the morning... anything beyond that I'm digging a hole and putting a 5000gal cistern to deal with the garden.

here...
http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agdex1160

H2S is only a little problem... the 1GPM is the bigger problem...

Then the neighbor's backhoe, clayliner & hoping the BC water people won't take exception to your unlicensed reservoir. Unless BC has something to the now defunct PFRA, which included grants for building ground water reservoirs for agro activities. Such as a special herb garden, but then you'd have to put up with CG as a primary customer ;)

Will that wet mixture kill the seeds in Straw? Otherwise using straw also adds a lot of weed seed to your garden. I've found something called salt hay which is like straw, but since it grows in brackish water its seeds do not germinate in normal soil so no weed seed.

Generally the idea is to fertilize and water the bale to saturation so that the bale starts to break down and heat. During the heating seeds that could potentially be wrapped up in the straw should germinate. However, if the prep process is done correctly the bacteria that are active during this stage should cause enough heat to cause the seeds to die once they've sprouted due to the heat and high content of nitrogen (urea in this case).

As a cool aside, on paper at least - a person could take DEF and write nasty note on a person's lawn, reseeding would help a bit, except the grass that regrows will be a different shade of green because of the change in nitrogen content.