First, let’s highlight why cow manure works as a fertilizer.
Have you ever heard, you are what you eat? This classic saying is a great way to help explain why cow manure works as a fertilizer, but dog poop does not. A cow’s diet is plant-based: grain, hay, soy meal, cottonseed, corn silage, and more. So, their poop mainly consists of undigested plant fibers. These fibers can add a boost of nutrients to the soil in your garden, helping your plants grow.
Dog poop as fertilizer is a much different story. Since dogs have high-protein diets their poop is much more acidic. As it breaks down, the nutrients are not compatible with the needs of the plants.
What to do with dog poop in your yard:
There is not much else you can do with dog poop other than find eco-friendly ways to dispose of it. Dog poop is loaded with bacteria. According to Poop 911, 1 gram of dog waste can contain as many as 23 million fecal coliform bacteria. This bacteria has been known to cause illness in humans and can poison waterways. It’s not really the type of thing you want to leave lying around in your backyard or even your garden beds. Article continues below advertisement
Freeze it.
You wanna hear something really gross? (If not, skip the next three paragraphs.) When Ruby was a baby, we’d wrap her diapers up and put them in the garbage. But guess who would dig them out and eat them? No, not Daddy.
The dog. Viggo would go to great lengths to procure this tantalizing delicacy, and his diaper proclivity resulted in squishy, lumpy piles of dog poo swollen with the pulpy, poopy diaper filling. It was a truly disgusting sight to behold and even more revolting to scoop it up in big, gelatinous handfuls.
It took us a while to figure out what was even going on with this new, weird poop, and when we did, we immediately solved the problem with a heavy-duty, lidded trash can—but I’m still a bit traumatized by the gruesome task of cleaning up those messes.
If only I’d known then what I know now about freezing dog poop to solidify it.
Super Cold 134 freeze spray chills whatever it touches to -60 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s actually made for “diagnosing thermally intermittent faults in electronic device components,” whatever the hell that means, but spray it on soft or runny poop, and Super Cold 134 will turn that caca rock-hard in seconds, making it easy to pick up in a single, frozen-solid poopsicle instead of hot, heavy dollops.
How to use Dog Poop in the Garden
You have three options for lifting the dog poop up from the surfaces in your yard so that you can deposit it somewhere else: Pick it up by hand, scoop it up with a pooper scooper, or vacuum it up. A little later, we’ll talk about how to dispose of dog poop once you’ve collected it—you have a lot of choices!
If your dog diarrheas in the yard, or the poop is too squishy to pick up without schmearing it across the grass or patio, you have a couple of options.
If you pick up dog poop using non-biodegradable bags, your only real option for disposal is to toss the poo in the garbage, preferably the one outside. But that can cause quite a stink as the poo festers and sprouts big globules of maggots between trash pickups.
The best way to dispose of dog poop is any way that doesn’t involve a) letting it fester, grow maggots, and stink up the place or b) sending it to the landfill in a plastic grocery bag. (Guilty!) Here, then, are some other, more interesting—and more eco-friendly—options for disposing of dog poop.
