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No quips about hair-raising tales, now—this is serious stuff. Scientists have been studying the fertilizing effects of human hair on crops, and the bald fact is that human hair—from the sweepings from hair salons, for example—makes a pretty good fertilizer for slower-growing crops.
It's not an entirely new idea. SmartGrow has been selling garden toupees for a while now, dense mats containing human hair from China and India that you can place under or over your plants to add nutrients, hold in moisture, and battle weeds. And if you don't have a garden, the mats make an excellent alternative to spray hair—and you can grow a great crop of herbs or lettuce right on your own head (potatoes and carrots not recommended)! Space-saving and multi-tasking!
Apparently human hair contains all the nutrients needed to make plants grow; it seems like such a waste to keep it on our heads, doesn't it? Just lying there doing nothing. But using human hair to help grow veggies and fruits brings up some interesting questions.
1. Is the produce still vegan? Seems to us that human hair is an animal product. Eating hair-raised veggies won't make your average vegan very happy.
2. What about product? In other words, how clean is this hair, and how tainted with petrochemical hair sprays, sodium lauryl sulfate- and paraben-ridden shampoos, and ammonia-laced hair coloring is it? Do we want that stuff in our food? Who's watching over this, anyway?
3. Does "just plain weird" have any weight here?
Sorry, I'll stick to other tried-and-true methods of fertilization for my veggies until I get some answers. Maybe like the Japanese used to do.
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I'm surprised that hair can even act as a fertilizer, as hair can be very difficult to decompose.
On the vegan question. I don't think of cultivating crops as a vegan practice. Even if you're working very much in harmony with nature (most farms aren't), it's a constant battle of squishing squash borers, drowning Japanese beetles, and using other methods to kill, trap, or remove pests to grow crops. Even using organic methods, death is part of the equation. Human hair as fertilizer seems pretty low impact to me--no humans harmed in the process, etc--but I'd think it would depend on the person's reason for being vegan whether it would matter, I guess.
And for #3 I'll add "gross" to your "just plain weird". Garden toupee? No thanks.