Bokashi in the greenhouse.

Did a big clean out in the greenhouse in the weekend and cleared out everything. Felt so wonderful to get rid of all the bits and pieces and do a restart. I’ve been growing tomatoes and cucumbers in big black buckets for years (the greenhouse itself has no soil) and that’s always been ok but it felt like time for a new approach.

So. Now it’s like this. I brought home 10 big bricklayers tubs from the local hardware store and lined them up in the greenhouse. Four on one side, six on the other (side-by-side rather than end-to-end). Then the fun started…

The tubs are 90 liters each (there are small ones available here too, 65 liters). Cost was some 13 euro each for the big, 8-9 for the small. And they’re really sturdy and nice! 900 liters in total to fill…

First up I put in a layer of drainage, the small clay balls that are called lecakulor in Swedish. Some 5 to 10 cm worth. So far I haven’t drilled any drainage holes, I’m thinking of not having any and using the drainage layer as a water reservoir if I’m careful and don’t overwater. But if I do go for holes I’ll drill them on the sides, at the same height as the drainage material. In a perfect world that means none of the valuable nutrients would be lost.

Next step was a layer of soil, just the cheap potting mix you buy at the supermarket this time of year. I thought a bit about putting a felt layer between the drainage and the soil but decided not to, if the roots want to make their way down into the reservoir it’s all theirs!

Then came the Bokashi! Some 20-30 liters ready fermented food waste from the kitchen. I happened to have a lot of biobags on hand so I used those, but obviously you take whatever you’ve got. But I did hack them open and spread out the goo reasonably evenly.

Then I added a couple of buckets of “real soil” from my soil factory in the garden, normal topsoil drenched in nutrients from last summer’s Bokashi. And the most ridiculous amount of worms! If they like it in their new home it’ll be just great to have them in on the operation.

Then topped up the tubs with more “sack soil”, the cheapest of potting mixes. I cut up the bags and tucked one over each tub to prevent evaporation until it’s time to plant. But now I’m even thinking I might plant my tomatoes and cucumbers in a hole in the plastic to reduce watering. What do you think?

Needless to say I deserved a beer at the end of all this! Just now the whole project looks like a workplace but I’m really excited about it. In my mind it’s already green and luscious with endless perfect tomatoes and cucumbers, maybe even kiwifruit, passionfruit or even a whole vineyard… Anyhow, I think it will be great and I’m dead curious to see how it works out.

One of the big benefits (I think) will be that come autumn I can dig down a new batch of Bokashi in all the tubs and renovate the soil ready for the spring. Maybe replace some of it if needed. It would be such a luxury to come out to the greenhouse in the spring and just wash it down and plant — having let the microbes and worms do all the hard stuff in the meanwhile.

Dreams are free! But I’ll let you know how the tomatoes work out!

…and in the old tomato buckets I’ve planted potatoes, all going well we’ll get a nice early batch in time for midsummer (and anyone who’s been to Sweden will know how important that is!). Fingers crossed.

Biogas — fuel from food waste

I don’t know how things are in your corner of the world, but here in Sweden there’s a lot happening on the biogas front. Making fuel out of food and animal waste would seem to be — on the surface — a cool way of making something good out of something bad.

Which is is. But there’s a few things I wonder about all the same.

The reason for taking it up here is I picked up a New York Times article recently on biogas, and they’re holding up Sweden as an example of how the whole biogas thing can be done and done well. I’m not sure what this means: are we actually out there doing new stuff in this arena, or was it just a fluke that they picked a Swedish town as an example? It would be interesting with some viewpoints from the real world! What’s happening where you are?

First, I can say that the article pretty much represents reality here. Biogas is nothing new, a lot of cities are collecting food waste and manure and pumping it into biogas factories. The pump stations are gradually emerging along with the cars and buses. District heating is common — and makes a lot of sense in a country with many energy-consuming industries (pulp and paper in particular) that can supply the local community with their surplus heat. (But don’t worry — we pay for it! Even with our taxes there’s no such thing as a free lunch!!)

District heating is for the townies, country bumpkins such as ourselves have the standard options.All-time favourite is wood, a tried and tested biological resource in a country such as this. Despite all the pulp and paper and wood-heated homes, we manage to end up each year with some five per cent more trees growing than the year before. A net increase in a country that’s basically covered in spruce from top to toe.

Other options in the home if you don’t have district heating are direct electricity (your standard radiators), but this is something people are trying to replace or make more efficient for cost reasons. Oil boilers are a thing of the past (cost again, let alone the environment). Pellets (wood-based) are big, a convenient form of bio-fuel for boilers and central-heating fireplaces. Rooftop solar heating isn’t really making a mark, although some brave souls are trying. Our winters are so damn cold and we have so little light that it just doesn’t seem that appropriate to try and heat your shower from an arctic sunrise…

On a national supply basis we have a bit of everything much the same as everyone else. Some green. Some not. Some downright shameful (Vattenfall, our more or less monopoly electricity supplier, is deeply into brown coal in Germany…)

But back to biogas. Personally I think it’s great with innovation, it’s great to see a new form of green energy, it’s great to see local biogas production units popping up all over the country, and it’s great to see waste that would otherwise go to waste or up into the atmosphere being put to good use.

My concerns are largely around the issue of biomass. Have we really thought this thing through? By pumping food waste, animal waste, whatever into biogas plants and pumping out gas, aren’t we just making fuel out of soil? Food waste IS soil after all, it comes from the soil, it belongs to the soil, it should go back to the soil. We have it on loan and we should pay it back. Are we really entitled to divert it into another ecoloop, an ecoloop such as fuel in which it will definitely not find it’s way back to being biomass?

Biomass in the world is decreasing as we speak. Every year we have less good land for growing. We have less good soil. We have less possibility to grow food. At the same time as we have a growing population and a changing climate. Not the best of combinations, obviously.

It seems to me that in an equation like that everything that comes from the soil should go back to the soil. Anything else is like living off capital. Taking and taking and forgetting to put back.

Admittedly, there’s two things come out of a biogas factory. One is the gas, well and good, but it’s not soil. The other, a by-product of the gas production, is a soil-like product. THAT at least is sent to farms as some sort of input to the process there. I’ve heard varying reports on the quality of this material though — some say it’s ok, but others say the nature of the gas production destroys much of the value of the soil-like product, it becomes a sort of landfill. Something that would be good to find out more about.

But however you look at it there are pluses and minuses. Big plus: we get a bio-fuel out of something that may well have gone to landfill in many parts of the world otherwise. Big minus: we give away soil from the food production ecocycle. With fat chance of every getting it back.

That’s my two-cents worth anyhow! What’s yours??

Read the New York Times articles here>>

A truckload of food waste (in this case imported to Sweden from Norway!!!)

Oh, and by the way — can’t have a whole post with no comment on Bokashi . In case you were wondering what the effect would be of pre-processing food waste with Bokashi or EM before it goes into a biogas process, the answer is GOOD. I don’t think it’s done on a commercial scale anywhere so far but pilot tests show the efficiency of the biogas process to be improved by up to 10 per cent when treated with Bokashi or EM. So a synergy effect would be possible, should anyone care to take it on! The convenience for householders would certainly be improved, when you think of collection times, smell, flies and the rest of it.

Bokashi in a bag! Perfect for Christmas leftovers

There’s something I’ve been wondering about for a long time: can you ferment Bokashi in a plastic bag?

So I’ve been testing it over the last months. And I have to say I’m quite excited about the result. Because it works every bit as well as a bucket once you get the hang of it. Perfect at Christmas if you get a rush on leftovers.

That means the up-front investment for getting started with Bokashi is zero. OK, you have to buy the bran but you have to buy that anyway, that after all is the magic of Bokashi. The buckets in themselves are very convenient but it’s the microbes that do the work not the plastic.

So how does it work? Take a plastic bag, a good thick one from a shoe store or something. I don’t know how things are where you live but the ones we get from the supermarket here are a bit thin and often have holes in them. You need your bag to be totally airtight. The thicker the better from an odour point of view as well.

You can put the bag in a bucket if you like or just put it in a cupboard or on the floor. You need a good thick newspaper, say half a centimetre thick in the bag. And you need a bag clamp of some sort: here I’ve used bag clamps from Ikea, they cost more or less nothing and everyone has them in their kitchen drawer here in Sweden.

Right. So you put the newspaper in the bag (a tabloid is usually the same width as a bag and slots in nicely with the fold at the bottom of the bag). Sprinkle in some Bokashi bran, tip in your food waste from the day, sprinkle over a little more Bokashi bran. Actually, just as you normally do in a “real” bucket. Clamp the bag.

And go on filling until the bag is full. It’s good to add a lot of serviettes, kitchen paper and the like into the bag as this all helps absorb moisture. If the bag feels too wet you’ll need to add another newspaper. Which isn’t actually a problem as the newspaper is good to have in your compost/soil later — the worms love fermented with EM microbes.

Keep the air in the bag to a minimum. Just give the bag a bit of a squeeze and a squash now and then before you clamp it.

That’s about it. Easy isn’t it? Leave the bag to ferment indoors for the usual two weeks. Then do whatever you usually do with it — into the garden, into the compost, into the woodshed or garage for storage until spring.

Once the bag has done it’s fermenting thing indoors it doesn’t matter if you store it cold outside. Which means you can stack up any number of bags in the shed through a long, cold winter and even if they freeze they’ll come back to life in the spring. For the sake of neatness you can store them up in big garbage sacks or barrel. One thing to think of if you’re going to store your Bokashi bags for some months is that they will go on generating liquid — be generous with the paper.

Another benefit of plastic-bag Bokashi is that you don’t have any bucket to wash. Just empty the bag and toss it, or use it again. It’s a really handy way of dealing with kitchen waste when you’re away from home (caravan? tent? cottage? canoe trip?) or have too much for your regular Bokashi buckets to handle.

It’s actually no harder than regular Bokashi composting with all the expensive gear so it may be a good way of getting sceptical friends and neighbours to test the concept. Give them some of your Bokashi bran (in a glass jar for example) and show them the ropes. Help them through their first cycle so they gain confidence then they’re sure to be converted! And if they’re not gardeners themselves they could fill the bags then hand them over to you for your garden.

Bear in mind that this plastic bag approach is a new concept. And so it’s not tested so much further than in our own kitchen (as far as I know). So it would be great if you’d test it yourself, give it a few rounds to see what you learn, and let us know so we can share it. Pictures welcome of course!

By the way, I wanted to be really sure the process was working so I kept a couple of bags indoors in a warm kitchen close to the radiator for three months. No problems at all with smell (although the bags did get a bit in the way after a while ). If you’re worried about rats and mice, don’t be: we have both in the vicinity as we’re close to farms (despite a hardworking cat) and they just aren’t interested in Bokashi bags. The fermented Bokashi is simply too acidic, too low pH. But test for yourself with a small bag in the woodshed or somewhere to be sure.

Good luck! Give it a go! And if you like the idea spread the word!!

ps If you’re really lazy you could put the fermented bags out in garden as they are. Make a couple of slits in the bottom and the worms will soon be in there working hard. In due course you can just shake out the bag and enjoy all your fantastic soil!

10 tips for reducing food waste in 2010

Pic: www.toonpool.com

I know Bokashi is about making soil out of what you can’t eat in the kitchen. But it’s just as much about tossing less stuff. Carrot peelings are one thing but you can’t help feeling a bit embarassed when you tip what should really have been dinner into the bin. Happens to the best of us. But I suspect a couple of months watching what goes in the Bokashi bin makes a lot of difference to a lot of people, suddenly you just can’t do it any more. And find yourself cringing when you’re at someone else’s place and they go around happily tossing out perfectly good leftovers. (Even worse is when you start wondering if they’d let you take them home with you…:-))

Anyhow, here’s an excellent blog with lots of good ideas for reducing food waste. From one sinner to another, as it were….

Read it 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

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!