Kate’s Bokashi bucket

Bokashi buckets come in all shapes and sizes. They look different in every country, and wherever you go people are finding cool ways of making their own. I thought it would be fun to pick a few and do a little show-and-tell here — a big thank you to the creative guys out there who have come up with so many practical, cost-effective solutions.

There are two basic criteria that you cannot compromise on: a Bokashi bucket must be airtight. And it must be drained properly.

Commercial buckets make this easy: there’s usually a built-in tap for draining the fluid, a little drainage platform inside, and a thoroughly airtight lid. You usually get two of them at once, which makes rotation easy. In Asia, New Zealand and other places a double bucket system is used: one bucket fits tightly inside the other, and the inside bucket has a lot of small holes to drain the liquid. We’ll take a look at that later. Also how you can make a Bokashi bucket using newspaper to soak up the fluid.

First up, here’s Kate’s Bokashi bucket. Kate’s blog is worth a read, she and her family are preparing to move from the inner city (Sydney) out to the Australian bush. They’re starting up a permaculture farm, no small task but hugely rewarding judging by their enthusiasm. So for those of you who think it’s hard work digging down a Bokashi bucket into your garden, spare a thought for Kate, she’s lugging them all the way out to their new property!

Kate’s basic idea is to take a bucket, screw in a tap, and make an internal drainage plate. She got a couple of tight-fitting buckets from “reverse garbage” and used the spare lid to create a raised drainage plate. Seems to work fine. She also made her own Bokashi bran herself, but you can always just buy that straight from a supplier. A bag really lasts quite a while and in the great scheme of things doesn’t cost terribly much. But whatever works for you.

Anyway check this out and we’ll be back soon with more creative ideas from Bokashi fans round the world!

Read Kate’s blog on how she made her own Bokashi bucket!

Dog poo + Bokashi = true!

You read right, dog poo makes great Bokashi. At least that’s according to Sarhn McArthur who lives in Sydney with a couple of dogs, a townhouse and a courtyard. And the courtyard, of course, gets scattered with dog poo at regular intervals.

You can read more about how she deals with it in her blog here, but basically she’s set up a special Bokashi bin for the dogs. A normal bucket with an airtight lid would do the trick. Line it with a newspaper torn in half to soak up any potential liquid (not necessarily needed). You could also line the whole bin with a biodegradable bag if you wanted to reduce the ick factor.

Fill the bucket gradually with dog poo, sprinkling regularly with Bokashi. Let it do its work. Then when it’s had time to ferment use the contents in your garden. NOT anywhere where food is going to grow. But its ideal as a bottom fertiliser layer in an outdoor planter, or when you’re renovating a patch of garden bed ready for replanting. Or whatever.

Sahrn makes it easy and judging by her photos it works fantastically well. She just fills the pot with fermented dog poo, scoops out a hole for the plant to go in, pops in the plant and covers over a bit with potting soil so it all looks nice. And bingo, you have a healthy fantastic plant!

Yep, I can understand this maynot be something that suits everyone but our dogs are going to do their business whether we like it or not. It certainly makes more sense to use it this way than filling a lot of small plastic doggy bags and sending them off to landfill. To throw away what is after all, a god-given fertiliser.

Cool idea Sahrn! Local recycling at best!

Community composting

These guys are cool! Fed up with watching food and garden waste going to, well, waste, they started a pickup service. It’s called Pedal to Petal, and the whole idea is to help people that want to make sure their food scraps end up somewhere other than landfill.

Pedal to Petal is a cooperative, a group of enthusiasts that decided to made something happen and are getting out there and doing it. They provide local residents with a small bin for kitchen scraps. They then collect the bins by bicycle on a regular basis and compost them using a network of backyard composters.

Currently, they’re collecting from more than 160 households in their little corner of Canada.

“We’re carbon-neutral; arguably, carbon-negative,” says Matt Schultz, a student at the University of Victoria who runs the day-to-day operations of Pedal to Petal with Johnson.

“We’re delighted to see that more and more people no longer find putting compostable material into the landfill garbage stream acceptable,” Schultz says.

Pedal to Petal wants to generate jobs and grow food for low-income people in Victoria. The group gives its compost to gardens that donate food to the community, such as the Haultain Common, a boulevard garden in the Oaklands neighbourhood.

The article talks about the different methods of composting that can be used in an urban setting. They talk about Bokashi but haven’t yet tested the many ways it can work as part of an overall solution. Digging fermented Bokashi into the ground is the standard solution. For people living in apartments, a balcony or cellar “soil factory” can be ideal (see our blog here!), and can be done on an individual or collective basis. Bokashi also works really well incorporated into traditional composting, not only is it a nicer and healthier way of collecting the scraps indoors, it cuts down the frequency of collection needed and makes a hell of a difference to composting speed outdoors.

When it comes to greenhouse gases, traditional composting is not the hero you’d like to think. A lot of methane and co2 is generated from the rotting process and ideally we should be using more carbon neutral solutions that store the carbon. Bokashi scores a 10 on this one as the food-to-soil conversion is done with virtually all of the carbon preserved intact. Where it should be, in the soil and not in the air.

But ultimately, the first step is the big one; whatever form of composting or fermenting or whatnot you decide to use, just get stuck in and do it. Anything that diverts food and yard waste  from landfill and gets it back into the soil is a good thing. And a huge improvement on what we’re doing now.

Not to mention how much we’d all benefit from a little more good old-fashioned community spirit. Good on you, guys!

Read the Canadian article here!

Family are winners in war on waste

Cool story here about a family in the UK that have become champions. In the very down-to-earth business of cutting down the amount of waste they throw out.

The winning family, Vicky and David Borrell their baby Isaac managed to win the prize by cutting their food waste by 100 per cent. They simply stopped throwing out food they couldn’t eat.

The article says they saved some £57 a week on their grocery bill in the process. (Which sounds like a huge amount of money to me — but even if its a media beatup the point still holds. There’s money to be had in this. UK research says the average family wastes £610 a year by throwing food away.)

Eight other local families were involved in the six-week challenge to see how much they could reduce their food waste. They got some help along the way, tips on how to reduce food waste in the kitchen as well as how to keep the scraps out of landfill by composting and/or using a wormery or bokashi bin.

In the UK, food waste is still being sent to the tip where it causes nothing but trouble for the environment. Methane and carbon dioxide from landfill are major contributors to the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. The obvious solution is to stop doing it. Deal with the food waste in a way which is carbon-friendly. (And needless to say, Bokashi is the most carbon-friendly of the above options.)

This was a really cool initiative. Imagine the effect it would have if we ran fun competitions like this all over the place, make people part of the change and create everyday heros who can help inspire us. It’s easy to be daunted by the huge impact of climate change and forget how many small, everyday things there are that we can get stuck in and do. Here and now!

Source: Shields Gazette

Try Bokashi in your vacuum cleaner!

Now I’m not the person you should come and talk to about cleaning. Vacuum cleaning is amongst the worse things I know. But the cleaner did actually come out in the weekend here and it reminded me that I really should mention my little Bokashi-in-the-vacuum-cleaner trick.

Actually, it’s dead easy. Toss a handful of Bokashi on the floor and suck it up with the vacuum cleaner. It gets into the bag and goes to work there, the microbes make a home amongst the dust and debris that’s accumulated from the floor.

I imagine it’s healthier, after all the Bokashi bacteria are “good guys” and they go to work straight away to outnumber the “bad guys” that came in with the dust. But best of all is the smell. Or lack of it.

What I really REALLY hate about vacuum cleaning is the smell of the hot air that comes out of the thing. And that’s a lot better now than it’s ever been. A really nice little side benefit of Bokashi that makes life a bit easier.

And actually, I do pull out the vacuum cleaner slightly more often now than I used to!

Local recycling at best — right under the apple tree!

Actually this is not the really deep and meaningful rave it could be about dealing with our waste ourselves, cutting down what we throw out and dealing with it as close to home as possible.

Although it does go to the heart of the matter in its way. It’s about my apple tree. How we trimmed it back hard and good in the weekend. And every last bit got used. Right there on the spot.

For a start, the deer had already eaten most of the apples. Which is ok, because they look nicer than they taste (the apples I mean, not the deer). But the branches that were growing every which way came off in a thick pile on the ground.

Should we compost them? Mulch them? Stack them on the too-hard pile for the winter?

Easiest solution was just to chop them into big bits, arm-length or so, and just pile them up under the tree itself. Soon enough they’ll sag down into a carpet, and in a month or two they’ll freeze and be covered in snow. Nature will do its work there over the winter and what I’m expecting in the spring is a nice patch of healthy soil under the apple tree where we can plant a few flowers for the summer. The big branches that are left will be easy to pick away, best of all is the fantastic work that the small guys do for us, all the time, while we’re not even looking. The microbes, the worms, the hedgehogs too for all we know.

I think it’s neat. Feels right, gives the soil a lift, the worms a home and for a rather lazy gardener such as myself its definitely the way to go.

This must be a million more ideas for local recycling right under our nose. Got any to share?

(Oh, and obviously I should have mentioned, I scattered a couple of handfuls of Bokashi bran over the leaves to help get the microbes get going on their task. If I get some spare Bokashi juice in the next couple of weeks I’ll toss that on too.)

Where has all the food waste gone?

I was thinking about this song the other day, you know the one: Where have all the flowers gone, Long time passing. Shows my age? No, honest, I think it was before my time.

Thinking how our concerns have changed focus but are infinitely more serious in a way. It feels like you couldn’t even try to write a song any more to express the worries we have for our future, for our planet, for our children and their future. But maybe that’s how they felt in the sixties too. So much good has come out of those worries, so much change and yet we now face concerns of such a dimension most are just doing an ostrich.

Today on national radio here there was a programme on food waste from supermarkets, and the big question is where on earth does it all go. The many charity organisations that could put any amount of close-to-use-by-date meat and vegetables to good use are not getting it. Nor are farmers, gardeners or others who could put it to use.

Most is simply wasted. Or used for energy recycling as they so euphemistically call it here. Which means burning it up in a huge modern mill and shipping out the energy onto the local district heating grid. Good in that at least some of the energy value in the food is put to good use. Bad in that none of it makes its way back to the soil where it belongs. And roughly a quarter of it ends up as a form of indescribable slag that even the rubbish tips can’t deal with.

Another hot use is biogas. Also an industrial, my-factory-is-bigger-than-yours solution. Generating much in demand biogas for running cars, buses and trucks. But also generating a sort of compost that has a quality often best suited to landfill. Unfortunately. Let’s hope the soil component turns out to be done well at some stage so at least some of it has the chance to become new food in the future.

The homeless generally don’t get much of a look in. The reason apparently is the stores are scared of generating a black market which would undermine their brands and possibly even cause a health scare. I’ve heard of stores that have all their food waste picked up by farmers, who then give it to their pigs. Which must be a good thing! But I’ve also heard that one of the big things stopping this sort of thing is all the plastic, a million small packages that have to be picked apart each day to separate the food from the packaging. Blah.

I been trying myself for a while to find a good second-hand food supplier. I’d like to start a small soil factory here, nothing extravagant, but a sort of demonstration setup to show how food waste can be simply and efficiently be recycled on quite a small piece of land using Bokashi and imagination. But so far I haven’t got hold of a supplier (which doesn’t mean I’ve given up, far from!). The local supermarkets won’t give me anything (but won’t say where their waste goes), a corner shop in town already has a deal with a guy who’s feeding wildlife (right or wrong I can’t say), and more institutional operators such as homes for old people require collection logistics on a scale I can’t handle. But there’s also fear and tradition to take into account; people are quite simply not good at doing new things.

But a bright spot! A Bokashi-colleague and friend is running a worm-farm in her garage (yep, you read right). She’s been collecting food waste from friends and cafes to feed to her worms. Time-consuming and delightful, but talk about putting food waste to a good cause!

Bokashi on an apartment balcony

Here on the blog we get a lot of visits from people looking for ideas for balcony gardens — and how they can use Bokashi in an urban environment where there’s not always a garden handy.

How about starting a “soil factory” on your balcony? Hardly needs any space and you can keep your fermented Bokashi food waste cycling through it year round if you live in a halfway decent climate. (Which ours is not unfortunately, but thank god for cellars!)

You’ll end up with a steady supply of fantastically rich soil. If you’re growing anything at all on your balcony it will be a godsend, you’ll notice the difference in the vitality of your plants immediately if you start growing them in Bokashi-soil.

Your friends and neighbours are sure to want some too, and it’s not hard to fill a plastic bag with fresh, healthy “supersoil” and drop it in to a neighbour. Or bring to a work colleague, to your allotment garden, or topdress the plants in the gardens around your apartment buildings. Guerilla gardening anyone?

Check the following post for instructions how to do it, it’s dead easy I promise, and if you experiment a bit you’ll come up with something that works really well for you.

And if you don’t have a balcony? Then try the cellar! Maybe you can get together with some of your neighbours and start a soil factory in the basement, perhaps even alongside the other recycling stations for paper and glass and stuff. You can reassure them there won’t be any smell or mess, after all you’re just dealing with a bunch of plastic boxes and good old natural soil. And there won’t be any problems with rats, they don’t actually like the stuff as it is too acidic for them. And anyhow, the boxes are sealed.

And the real bonus of all this is less rubbish to cart around. You don’t have to drag so many rubbish bags down to the big bin, and there’s less stuff for the council to cart away. And if everyone did it in your building you’d have a much nicer smelling basement. Guaranteed!

And who knows, maybe even a nice-looking flower garden instead!

Make your own “soil factory”!

…and as you can see, it’s not in the least complicated!

This is a great way of putting your fermented Bokashi to use without having to dig holes or mess around with compost. Best of all, it’s really quick and easy and you won’t get your hands, clothes or shoes dirty.

You’ll need a plastic storage box of some kind with a well-fitting lid (doesn’t have to be completely airtight). A plastic boat scoop like I’ve got here is also good to have.

Put a couple of scoops of plain old garden soil in the bottom of the box. Tip in a bucket of fermented Bokashi food from your kitchen. Add a bit more soil and mix and stir a bit so the food gets reasonably coated with soil. Put the lid back on. That’s it!

When you have a look in a couple of weeks you’ll see there’s more soil and less food. Your soil factory is doing its work! The nutrition and carbon in the Bokashi-treated food is being absorbed by the “start-soil” and what you end up with is “super soil”, an excellent soil improver to spread around your flower beds, use in planter boxes or outdoor pots, or sprinkle around plants that need a vitamin boost.

You can run your soil factory more or less forever. Just scoop out the soil you need for the garden and leave some in the box to mix with your next Bokashi bucket. If you have too much soil, you can start another box or scoop over some of the ready soil into black garbage sacks to use later — or give to your friends!

Some tips and ideas (and a couple of things to watch out for):

- You can “renovate” the soil from potplants that have had their day. Just add it to the box! This is also a good way of diluting the soil in your box and adding structure.

- Soil fresh from your soil factory may have a low pH for a week or two, depending on how long it’s been in the box. Experiment until you get used to it. It’s also extremely nutritious, so you might want to mix it with potting mix before planting in it.

- Chances are you’ll get some white mould forming on the top of the soil. GOOD! Just as it is in your Bokashi bucket, that’s a sign that the microbes are doing their work and colonising the soil. Mix it around if it bothers you, otherwise just leave it.

- Leaves are great! Toss a few handfuls of autumn leaves into your box and watch them disappear. They’re a good resource and good for the soil structure, handy if you don’t have enough garden soil to use in your box.

- Soil like this is nature’s own product. It will last forever! The sooner you get it onto your plants the sooner they can benefit from the nutrition and microlife in it, but otherwise it’s easily stored until spring or whenever you need it.

- Temperature. Warm is good! Not so hot you kill the microbes (keep it under 40 degrees C), and not so cold nothing happens (less than +6 degrees C). In a sunny spot by the kitchen door is good, on the balcony if you live in an apartment, in the cellar by the boiler if you have one. In the wood shed, the laundry, the garage. It will all work, just test and see what suits you best. And it doesn’t matter if your soil factory freezes, the microbes will come back to life again in the spring and carry on their work.

So good luck! And let us know how you get on with your soil factory!

Summer in Bokashiworld

It’s been a busy summer in Bokashiworld!

Offline at least. Very quiet on the blog posting front, but that’s probably as it should be when it’s summer, the garden is in full swing and there are tomatoes and fresh herbs to pick, grass to mow, flowers to smell…

Last weekend we took part in the local harvest festival –with a Bokashi stand no less! The festival is no small event in these parts, given that we have a local population of 10-15,000 and quite a few thousand of them were out and about visiting the 30 or 40 farms, gardens and local businesses that were open around the district. (It’s one of those sort of districts the tourist folks usually label with tags such as the “corn basket of wherever…”, actually quite a neat place when you think the whole district is a huge peninsula that sticks out into Sweden’s biggest lake. Which happens to be the second biggest lake in Europe. Beautiful fresh water and some 10,000 islands scattered throughout. And a bit of a sun trap in this cold hard climate.)

Our Bokashi stand was a great success, we had a steady flow of people stopping by to check out what it’s all about, find out how they could get started and learn more about the whole process. It was inspiring to meet so many curious, motivated and genuine people — you can’t help but be struck by how strongly people want to “do the right thing”, get the chemicals out of their gardens, stop the waste, do something good for the environment. However small the change may appear in the great scheme of things.

But we small individuals add up to many, and there’s real power in that. Even better than changing a light bulb each would be to get hold of a Bokashi bucket and start stopping the waste. Do something good for the soil, show our kids how to take care of precious resources here and now. And work, for once, with nature instead of against it!

Even a handful of freshly-picked tomatoes in an urban garden is still a harvest and counts for a lot. You don’t need a harvest festival full of farmers and tractors to be reminded how precious it is to eat food you’ve grown yourself, that is as pure as nature intended and that is in all ways good for us, body and soul!