A few weeks ago I did the rounds to see my parents. No small thing considering my mum lives in Sydney and my dad lives in Auckland. And I am living here in Sweden…

Given that both places are Bokashi hotspots I would have loved to have spent some time sticking my nose into things there. having a bit of a chat with people and seeing what’s going on. But it just wasn’t that sort of trip so the study visit will have to be saved for another time.

One small thing I did do while I was with my mum in Sydney was help her get restarted with Bokashi in her small courtyard garden. (That’s it in the picture above. Cute. But very small…). In true nerd fashion I got her started on Bokashi composting 3 or 4 years ago and she liked it a lot. Not having much space though it made most sense to use the same hole each time to dig down the fermented contents of the bin (my brother got that job ). She scooped out the ready soil from the Bokashi hole in advance, worms and all, spread it in good spots in the garden, then the new bucket went into the same spot. Worked brilliantly in a warm climate like Sydney.

But the thing is now her arthritis means she’s having trouble with the indoor bins. Too hard to open and close. So we decided to give those away to some neighbors and do the whole thing directly in the courtyard.

Step one, I walked down to the local hardware store and bought a biggish bucket. It didn’t have a lid so I picked up a planter tray roughly the same size that could sit on top of the bucket. I asked the guys in the shop if they wouldn’t mind sawing off the bottom of the bucket for me. Obviously they thought I was nuts but it was really no problem.

Step two, we sort of screwed the bucket down into a spare spot in the little garden, hidden behind a fern. We put the planter tray on top and plonked the nearest heavy thing on top to keep it in place. Ta dah…!

What she does now is to toss her food scraps each day directly into the bucket. A sprinkle of Bokashi bran, lid back on and that’s it. No clumsy lids to open and close and no buckets underfoot in the kitchen.

I’m not saying this is the perfect solution but it seems to be working fine and is a good compromise if you want to get many of the benefits of a full Bokashi system without going all the way. The trick is to throw in a handful of soil now and then, or some dry leaves, to trigger it along.

The bucket we bought was really not that big and filled up in a few weeks so she’s doing another one in another spare spot in the garden. Between the two buckets she should be able to deal with most of the scraps she produces.

And given that her soil is hopelessly sandy this should make all the difference. The worms at least seem to be extremely happy!

A couple of weeks ago I got to do something fun. Talk about Bokashi on webradio!

There’s a woman in Montana who does a web radio show on gardening. (What else could she possibly write about given that her name is Kate Gardner?!). She called and we talked. And talked…and talked. Probably got a bit carried away with it all actually but it was such fun. And in the end she knocked it up into a nice little session called Bokashi 101.

So if you’ve got an hour to spare load it up on your iPod and take the dog out for a walk.

It was really fun talking to Kate. But what I learnt is that it’s hard to keep your thoughts in a straight line when you’re being asked questions. Running a course is much easier! So there were a couple of really important things I would have liked to bring up if I’d only remembered.

And they are this:
1. That the topsoil on our planet is fast fading away. Some estimates are that we are losing 1%  per year. Yikes. So whatever we do in this generation of ours, we have to make sure we start building top soil again. Every bucket of Bokashi you dig down adds a bucket of topsoil to the planet. A bucket for mankind and not for the landfill…

2. That the single most important thing about Bokashi is that it puts carbon into the soil where we need it and not into the atmosphere, where we absolutely don’t. Each bucket you dig down is a sort of micro carbon sink. A bucket of carbon in the soil is a good thing. Half a bucket of carbon in the air is not a good thing. (What happens in a regular compost pile or even a landfill pile is that almost half the organic waste goes up into the air in the form of greenhouse gases. Much of it as methane which is a far worse gas than carbon dioxide.)

Today (on my dog walk!) I listened to the next installment of the Bokashi story on Kate’s web radio show. Here she’s talking to an inspiring couple in Great Falls, Montana, who are working hard to set up large-scale Bokashi composting units in schools and food banks in the area. There’s a lot of trial and error behind how Michael and MJ do it and it’s interesting to hear their story. Everything we’re doing with Bokashi is a sort of pioneer thing, a lot of product development, and the more we can compare notes and share ideas the better it’s going to be.

Anyhow it’s well worth listening to their story. If you’re curious about the nuts and bolts of how they build their bins check their website. Basically they’re using shipping pallets, insulation foam and plastic to build modular, insulated bins. Food waste, wood chips and Bokashi bran in; three months later soil out. Really cool concept, and I think somewhere here is the start of what we’re going to be doing all over in a few years time.

Got your iPod handy? Got your dog handy? Take a nice walk in the autumn leaves and enjoy!

Here’s the link: http://webtalkradio.net/2011/10/24/the-manic-gardener-–-kitchen-composting-bokashi-101/

And here’s the link to Kate’s blog, The Manic Gardener. Worth reading!!

http://themanicgardener.com/

Now is the time!

Grab a few sacks on the next fine day and fill them with autumn leaves, the nice dry fluffy ones. Even better, keep an eye on what your neighbours are doing, maybe they’ll do all the work filling sacks and you can just sweetly ask for them when they’re ready.

Sacks of leaves make great soil, especially in combination with Bokashi. Without Bokashi you’ll get a sack full of lovely leaf compost in two or three years. If you toss in a few Bokashi buckets in each sack during the winter you’ll most likely find the contents will turn to soil during the coming spring and summer.

There’s two tricks (three, if you count getting your neighbors to do all  the work ).

Winter: line up your sacks nice and close to the kitchen door. That way you won’t have to go far to empty your Bokashi buckets. As long as it’s reasonably dry in the sacks (and we’re talking plastic sacks here) you won’t have any smell at all. No rats or mice either as they’ll find it too acidic. But the trick is not having to wade through snow and rain to get to them, chances are I’m not the only lazy one round here. Keep the bags sealed with a tie or clip. If it’s feeling a bit damp throw in a newspaper or two to take up the condensation.

Spring: move the sacks to a nice sunny spot, the warmer the better. OK, I’m talking northern European climates here where it never gets TOO hot! If you live somewhere with real heat you’d probably want to find a place that’s just warm. The microbes from the Bokashi will spring into action and team up with the microbes that came in with the autumn leaves — together they’ll trigger the soil-making process.

If you’re looking for some good mulch early on in the season you should find one of these bags just perfect. The food waste will be pretty much gone, absorbed up into the leaf mulch. Give it a couple of months longer and you’ll have a nice bag of potting mix. The leaves don’t have a lot of nutrition but the Bokashi  certainly does, how strong it is depends on the mix you used.

Chances are some worms will have made their way in, if not you can always plant in a few. Pop a few air vents for the guys. Some small slits in the bottom of the sack would let worms in and out and also let the bag drain if needed.

I’ve spoken to a few people who do this in their greenhouse and think it works really well. Which is quite smart because it’s usually nice and warm in there and cuts down on handling if you’re planning to use the soil in the greenhouse come spring. One tip is to position the sacks on your planting beds and let them drain in the spots you most want to fertilize.

Another cool idea is to plant directly in the sacks come spring. Ideal if you want to grow pumpkins or something that wants rich, warm soil. Lay out the sacks in the growing spot, make slits where you want to plant and poke in a bit of plain soil. Pop in the pumpkin. That’s it! Even if the food waste is still evident in the bag the plants will be able to take up the nutrients directly — that’s the whole point of Bokashi.

And it’s the perfect way to grow stuff on a weedy spot. The bags will act like a quarantine for the growing pumpkin plants (or whatever!) — keeping nutrients in, weeds out, and on top of it kill off the weeds under the bag. And when the pumpkins are harvested it’s just to slice up the bag and mulch down the lot.

Could be a fun idea for schools and pre-schools? It’s kind of fun to see how the food waste goes in one end and pumpkins come out the other. A project that could start and finish at Halloween.

Way more fun than throwing the stuff in the bin!

Do you remember the first time you looked in your first-ever Bokashi bucket? All the excitement of a sparkling new project on the go. Hopes and dreams about changing your life, changing the world.

So you open your bucket and… Nothing. Just food scraps. Sort of mushy, but still — food scraps. Is that it then? Doesn’t it get any better than this?

The thing is that there IS a lot going on in that bucket. It’s just that we can’t see it.

The first thing to face up to is that you won’t get soil in your bucket. Never. Ever. Just doesn’t work that way.

What you will get is pickled food scraps. That look exactly like the food scraps you scraped off your plate the other day. The “pickling”, or fermentation is a process that is really handy for us. It means we can be as lazy as anything, not have to go out with the scraps to the compost in the dark and slush and not have to put up with the slime, smell and flies you would quite likely have had otherwise if you’re a bit lazy with that compost bin trip.

You have to admit it’s quite comfortable having a no-smell bin in the kitchen that deals with everything.

But that’s not the reason for Bokashi, it’s actually all about dealing with the food scraps in the way that will give the best possible results for your plants.

So what happens in your Bokashi bin actually?

The microbes go to work pretty quickly on the food waste and do two things. One, they multiply. Every 20 minutes or so if they like the look of things. And soon you have a full bin of microbes munching at the bit to get out and do something in your garden.

And two, they go to work on your chicken bones, cheese rinds, macaroni leftovers. Food is made up of a lot of proteins and stuff and the microbes job is to break up those proteins into their component parts, which are amino acids. The tiny little bits of the protein chains.

If you bury a banana skin in the ground your average tomato plant won’t be able to get much out of it. But if that same banana skin had been through a Bokashi bucket first your tomato plant would be able to “eat” it directly. That’s because the plant can take up the nutrients in the amino acids with help of the microbes, it’s a kind of package deal.

I think you could sort of compare it to turning up at a big Christmas dinner. On one table is a pig. On the other is a beautiful array of turkey slices, meatballs, vegetable dishes and dessert. Complete with knives and forks and everything else you could ask for. Which would you choose?

What do the microbes add in all of this? A lot. As well as basically serving up the food in bite-sized portions ready for the plants they tend to do all the running around. Talk to the plants (through their roots) and ask what’s on their wish list for the day in the way of nutrients. Like little mini waiters they then scurry off and fetch the required dishes. And their tip? A nice dose of sugar from the plant, delivered in some way via the roots.

If the same food scraps had gone straight into a traditional compost they would also have become soil in the end. But in the process most of the nutrients would have leached away. Much of the carbon in the compost would have gone up into the atmosphere in the form of methane and carbon dioxide. And the nutrients that remained would have lost their valuable “fast-food” structure during the rotting process. Nothing against composting — but it is a very different process to fermentation.

Now I’m no biologist so I know this is ridiculously over simplified. If you can add something to the description or put it right I’d love your feedback. But all in all I think our buckets and their billions of microbial residents deserve a great pat on the back for a job well done. Over and over and over again.

So even if there’s nothing much to see when you empty that Bokashi bucket there’s a lot to be grateful for.

And the real thanks is the happy bouncing plants you get at the end of the day. It’s just that there’s more teamwork involved than you’d ever imagine!

Well, I think it does! Bokashi is one of those few things in life that you know is really cool from the first second, then year after year just goes on convincing you even more. And I’m not alone. The world is full of us, Bokashi fans who are quietly spreading the word by word of mouth. Changing the world. One bucket at a time.

But what I really wanted to write about are Bokashi Rules. The most basic things you need to do to get it working. There’s just a couple and they’re surprisingly simple.

1. Keep it airtight.

Rule number one. You’ll need an airtight bucket. Bokashi (EM) microbes are anaerobic and work best in a tightly sealed environment. Try not to open your bucket more than one or two times per day and it will be fine.

2. Keep it dry.

Some buckets have taps/spigots, others don’t. You’ll get just as good an end-result either way but the key is to keep the moisture level right down in the bucket. And food waste is wet. If you’ve got a tap you can drain off the liquid a couple of times a week (great plant fertilizer!) and if you’ve got a plain old bucket you’ll need to absorb the liquid using newspaper, household paper, egg cartons or whatever you have handy. Squash it all down and you’ll find it doesn’t take as much space as you’d expect.

If you see condensation on the inside of your lid then the contents of your bucket are too wet. Thow in an egg carton or something dry. The reason: if your bucket is too wet it will smell. And that’s not fun.

3. Keep it warm.

Depends what part of the world you live in of course but room temperature is a good guideline. 20 degrees Celsius (sorry, what’s that in F?). Too cold and the microbes in your bucket won’t be able to reproduce quickly enough and there’s a chance your bucket will start going off before it’s fermented. But once it’s done its thing for a couple of weeks indoors you can do what you like with your bucket. Dig down the contents, put it on the porch for storage, tip it into a storage bag in the woodshed. No worries if it freezes during the winter. But heat during those first two active weeks is really important.

And that’s about it!

Keep it dry, airtight and warm and you’ll never have a smelly bucket.

Actually it’s hard to imagine anything much simpler. Not surprising there’s so many of us who really think Bokashi rules!

First. A confession. I don’t live anywhere near a city.

But we have a patch of gravel outside the house so that, for the time being, is my urban backyard.

My idea was to test if you could grow a “garden” in a pile of bread crates on a wooden pallet. Then use them during the winter for storage of Bokashi. Conclusion: works brilliantly.

I started in the winter (the original blog is here) and now that summer is just about done here there’s no doubt it works really well. Actually I’m quite excited because I think this could be a really nice way for people with real urban backyards to get a small garden going AND recycle more or less all their food waste on a patch of asphalt no bigger than one square metre.

This is the summer bit. (The winter bit involves storing cured Bokashi in bio-bags or plastic bags in the empty crates.)

First step, you’ll need a pallet and up to ten plastic crates. Not too deep or you’ll never be able to lift them. Get hold of some plastic potting mix bags and cut them to size. Poke in a few drainage holes. (In the original experiment I used newspaper for lining. Forget it, it gets too dry. Plastic is better.)

Then a first layer of potting mix, just the cheap stuff from the garden shop.

Empty a bucket of cured Bokashi and spread it around nicely.

Then top up the crate with soil.

Lift on the crate you’re going to plant in. This one I’d done a couple of weeks earlier. You can have up to five crates in a stack, makes a nice working height. (No snails! No weeds!)

If you plant in a couple of worms before you know it you’ll have a whole colony doing their bit for your garden!

Time to plant! Herbs, lettuce, whatever will do ok in the shallow soil. But it seems to me you can plant quite intensively as the soil is so good.

Ready! Just to let them grow and enjoy the results.

The good thing with growing in a stack like this is that run-off nutrients from the top crate will filter down through the others and not be wasted. In peak season you could spread out the trays and grown in all of them, or hand them out to friends and neighbours ready-planted.

When the season is over the soil will still be quite good in the trays, so empty them somewhere valuable and stack up the trays nice and neat ready to be used as winter storage. You may even want to lift the whole thing into the cellar to make life easier in the winter.

I’m happy to say our tomatoes are doing really nicely this year! I’d like to say that it’s all due to the great Bokashi soil they’re growing in but I have to be honest and say it’s been a great summer with a lot of warm days. (Not something you can always count on in Sweden…:-))

Nevertheless! The tomatoes are growing in a variety of buckets big and small, suits me better than growing straight in the ground. This year I’ve tested a row of smallish buckets (the ones in the pic) for the cherry tomatoes. And they’re working brilliantly.

For a start, it’s recycling at best. I collected a ton of mayonnaise buckets from the local pizzeria during the winter and put them on stock. Each tomato bucket is made up of two pizzeria buckets. In the inner buckets I drilled normal drainage holes and in the outer buckets I just drilled a couple of holes on the side (as you can see in the pic). That means that all the valuable Bokashi  juice that drains from the soil is collected in the lower bucket and eventually taken up by the plant. If there’s too much water the excess will drain off through the side holes, but I try to manage it so nothing much is lost.

And it certainly makes life easier when you go away for a couple of days to know the guys have a little water reserve of their own underfoot.

Nutrients? Well, the Bokashi soil goes a long way so I don’t usually start adding extra nutrients till quite some way down the track. I fill the buckets with one-third Bokashi straight from the kitchen and two-thirds soil (just cheap potting mix). You could mix it first but I normally don’t bother, just throw in a thin layer of soil first then the Bokashi then the rest of the soil.

Later in the season I usually top up the soil with some grass clippings (nitrogen power-boost but also helps keep the moisture in place) and some bokashi juice from the bin in the kitchen. None of it is that systematic mind you, most things in my garden tend to happen on the spur of the moment.

One question that comes up quite often is what happens if you overdose the Bokashi, too much of the good life. Will you just get a lot of leaves and no fruit? Or overgrown tomatoes with no taste?

Well, you have to admit things certainly grow well in this supersoil. And I’ve had a few things grow bigger and faster than I would have maybe chosen. But with a bit of common sense you usually find a reasonable balance quite soon — just look at the Bokashi you dig down as being as strong as cow dung, possibly stronger and go from there.

I ran into a woman living nearby a while ago, she’s one of these great gardeners that has grown everything that goes on the kitchen table for the last 30 years, and has been using Bokashi for some three years. Of course I was curious! But she said, there’s a bit of a problem… Oh? (Yikes, I’m thinking…) What’s that? Well, you see it’s my cherry tomatoes. Yes, and? Well, they’re big. Much bigger than I’ve ever grown before. So how do they taste, watery? No, they’re just marvellous! Healthy, juicy and delicious. They’re just bigger than any I’ve seen before! So there’s no real problem then…? Nope, this Bokashi thing is just brilliant!

Phew.

Just back from a couple of weeks backpacking in the Greek Islands. Heavenly — of course!!

But there were a couple of things that really got me thinking. The first was plastic bags — far too many of them were blowing around on the islands and out to sea. Blah.

And the other was the soil. Bone-hard.

I don’t know how you’d get a spade into it if you didn’t soak it up with a few buckets of water first. You’d think it would be a dream to grow fruit and veg in a place where the sun shines every day (believe me, a contrast to here!!) and for us it was a real treat to eat so many fresh peaches and apricots and cherries. But not a lot is grown on the islands, and the few hardy souls that have a kitchen garden growing are working hard with it. Water is precious in the towns and villages as it is, but when you head out just a bit further you realize just how hard people are working on their little patches. Deep wells, buckets on ropes, plastic jerry cans and donkeys. Up and down those steep slopes, day after day year after year.

But still. You can’t help thinking what a difference some organic material would make in the soil. A decent layer of mulch. Manure.

But when you look around you realize there’s not much mulch to be had. The little strawlike stuff there is goes to the donkeys, the rest is dry as dust. And I’m sure the little manure from goats and donkeys is put to good use.

Meanwhile down at the beach and in the village the streets are full of tavernas and cafes, plate after plate of marvellous sallads, souvlakis and roast chickens carried in and out of the kitchens. Nerd that I am I tried hard to crane my neck behind the scenes and into the kitchens, try to see what they were doing with all the leftovers. And time and time again I saw them land in the bin. One big bin. Paper, cans, glass and all the good food bits from the kitchen. I’d like to think some of it was kept aside for the donkeys and goats but I’m not so sure. Big bins of rubbish to be carried away at the end of the day, a big load on small islands with little infrastructure.

It felt so hopeless.

Two big problems. One easy solution. How to connect the dots?

I was a wimp. I didn’t take up the discussion with anyone. How could you? But it was tough to see what a difference Bokashi could make in this situation and not be able to do anything.

The change has to come from within in some way. But first they have to find out about it. I don’t think there’s any big Bokashi/EM movement anywhere in Greece yet. But I’m putting my hopes on Australians! Bokashi is taking off nicely in Australia, and in Australia you have a huge Greek population. (Melbourne used to be the third biggest Greek city in the world population-wise!). So let’s say one day some guys from Australia go “home” to visit their relations and bring with them some Bokashi. Talk it through, get something started. Show the difference. Anchor the concept a bit. Make sure there’s a supply line for EM and Bokashi bran.

It has to start somewhere. And it’s just too sad to see such an opportunity wasting. It would be great to see some of those little kitchen gardens getting a better chance. And it would be a real relief to see the leftovers from tavernas and cafes channelled back into the gardens of their neighbours.

Please someone — just do it!!

ps One thing I have to say was quite pragmatic…tomatoes and peaches growing around church walls!

pps This thing with flying. We went by air to Athens and took boats from there. I’m not proud about the flying bit, we try to travel by train wherever possible, or just skip it. But this trip we decided to do anyhow. And enjoy it to the utmost!

Cool idea isn’t it? Tomatoes growing up the wall. Veggies growing in pyramids.

This high-school in Hod-Ha’Sharon makes research on agriculture which can be done by people in their apartments, balconies, walls or roofs.
They also study how to re-use and recycle water.

They test whether tomatoes can grow in bags on the wall or whether it is possible to cultivate plants in triangle-shaped pyramids, made from soil in plastic foils.
This method advantage is that the ground area can multiply in 3 times the number of plants growing comparing to conventional flat bed.

Given that most people in the world live in dense urban environments this is the way to go. How can we feed a growing world population? My guess is that the first thing is to learn how to “produce” soil and then find a whole lot of creative new ways of using it so we can grow on whatever spaces we have available.

Here we’re testing the idea of producing soil and growing in bread crates. It’s looking promising at this stage! 10 bread crates stacked on a wooden pallet (2 stacks of five shallow crates). Make soil in the lower crates (Bokashi and potting mix) and grow herbs and salad in the top ones. You maybe don’t grow so incredibly much food but it’s looking like a small family could take care of all their own food waste on a space no bigger than a pallet. On asphalt or a sunny corner at the back of an apartment building.

Love to hear your ideas! There are probably many crazy ideas worth testing — who knows, some of them may be what our children’s children end up using to grow their own food. It would be nice to think we’ve helped make it happen.

Read the article here>>

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Last August a friend of mine gave me a bucket of Bokashi for my garden. And ran off. Fast.

Nothing strange about the bucket thing, she drops off her buckets all the time as her garden is much smaller than mine. So I didn’t get it. Until later.

When I read the post-it note on the lid. “Innehåller surströmming”. Contains rotten herring.

Nice.

Surströmming is a Swedish specialty. One I’ve managed to avoid very successfully until now. It’s herring, basically. Preserved in a kind of fermentation process. And it stinks to high heaven. God knows how anyone could eat it.

But her husband comes from that part of the country so they’d been doing the herring thing and obviously had rather a lot left over. So I just sort of looked at the bucket for the next week before I dared to open it.

And?

Didn’t smell. Just your average Bokashi bucket.

So I dragged the bucket along with me to a couple of harvest fairs we were at in September, a couple of workshops and diverse other sessions. Had a lot of fun watching people getting up the courage to open the lid.

The thing is Bokashi does the job every time. The stuff in your bin really won’t smell if you keep it as dry as possible.

The more interesting thing is what happened next, when I dug it down, finally, in the late autumn. That particular spot now has the best soil in the whole garden. Never seen such fat happy worms. It’s almost a bit perverse.

But now they have fat and happy leeks to compete with. A good outcome all round.

ps is it easier for you to follow this on facebook? If so, I’m posting the blogs here on bokashiworld on facebook, plus a lot of other bits and pieces that just turn up.