Composting Update

It's been a few months since I posted about our fantastic bokashi composting system that I'm using for our kitchen scraps. (For more on bokashi, check out this recent article on Sustainablog.) We're now long since finished our first round with bokashi, and have been waiting to start the next step. (The plants that I fed the tea in the meantime have definitely perked up a bit, although some of them developed some white fuzz on the soil surface from the new beneficial microorganisms that the tea added.)

Enter our new tumble composter:

After a lot of research, I went with this one from Lee Valley, although it was more expensive than others on the market, because it had better reviews and the ability to make compost tea. It's also Canadian-made. (The other one I had wanted, while considerably cheaper, has been knocked by reviewers for a leaky hatch that also can let rainwater in, doesn't allow tea collection, and it's made on another continent.)

We do also have one of these things in our garden:

But by putting it in a really sunny spot next to the house to encourage the composting process, I also put it in too dry of a spot, and just couldn't seem to keep it wet enough to keep the process going. Drying out will be much less of an issue with our new rolling contraption.

Here are some photos of what we put in, back in early July:

- for the green stuff, some salad greens and veggies that were starting to go slimy in my fridge, some fresh lawn clippings and dandelion leaves, and trimmings from the garden (a lot of the weeds I get can grow from root pieces so I'll send those off with the garbage for my municipality to compost in their award-winning industrial-strength composting system instead)

- for the brown stuff, the top layer from our old composter - which are lawn clippings that have been left to dry out (we don't use pesticides or herbicides so I feel comfortable with that) - in about equal proportion to the greens already in the new bin

- the rather yucky contents of the bokashi composter, which are thoroughly pickled and just need the finishing step where the pH is brought back to neutral

- a couple of dried-up organic veggie transplants that never made it into the garden, along with the soil they were in

Oh, and a handful of the bokashi bran for good luck - even though this will be an aerobic process, not anaerobic like in the bokashi container in the kitchen - and a couple of handfuls of topsoil. I also rinsed the bokashi composter out with the garden hose, and poured that liquid into the tumble composter so that everything was nice and damp. Since then, we've tried to give the drum of the composter a solid tumble once a day. We haven't been super diligent about doing it daily, but the kids are pretty enthusiastic about helping to turn the drum.

Today, since we had more fresh grass clippings, dried grass clippings, some dead annuals, and kitchen scraps to add, we opened it to take a look. The volume of the material in the composter has reduced down, in the space of a month, from half-full to about a quarter-full, although it's not much lighter. The smell and the presence of flies definitely indicate that the material is rotting. I'll have to check with my composting gurus to make sure it looks like it is supposed to, but we never got the other style of composter to the point where is smelled, so I'll view that as progress. =D

After topping up the drum to about two-thirds full of material and giving it a solid tumble, I closed it up again, and the plan is to tumble it daily and check on it weekly from this point on.  Wish me luck!

Slow Living: Bokashi Composting

Inspired by recent posts on local blogs ADHDCanuck and Girls and Bicycles, I bought a bokashi composting kit a couple of weeks ago at my local eco-store.

Bokashi isn't technically composting (which needs oxygen); it's anaerobic fermentation. It's a super simple process. You layer your food scraps with bokashi bran, which contains the starter culture for the fermentation, cover the mixture so no air can get in, and repeat until the bucket is full while using the tap to remove any extra liquid - which you dilute and use as plant fertilizer. Then you wait a couple of weeks for the microbes to do their thing. At the end of the process, the food scraps will look like they've been pickled; you mix them into your regular compost bin (or a vermicomposter) or bury them mixed with soil in a pit in your garden to allow the decomposition to complete and get nice black compost. My plan, since I have no room indoors (until I get the basement organized) for a worm bin, is to save my bokashi-treated scraps until springtime, then add them to our outdoor compost pile. They can apparently be frozen, so I'll just transfer them to another airtight container and put them in our (detached, unheated) garage until the composter emerges from the snowbanks.

Being me, I had to do some extra research before I got started, so I did some hunting online. Here are some great sites that describe the bokashi process in detail:

• http://www.greencalgary.org/resources/bokashi-composting/ Great intro article. If you read just one article, choose this one.
• http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/339/1/Bokashi-composting.html and http://www.organicsoul.org/bokashi-composting-using-the-power-of-microorganisms/ are also introductory articles
• http://myzerowaste.com/2009/05/compost-awareness-week-top-tips-for-using-bokashi-bins/ includes a great lists of pros & cons and some tips, and there are more tips at http://www.the-compost-gardener.com/bokashicomposting.html
• http://www.bokashi.com.au/How-Bokashi-works.htm is a fantastic introductory page with lots of YouTube videos embedded
• http://www.cityfarmer.org/bokashi.html and http://www.gardenerspantry.ca/great-tips-and-videos/all-about-bokashi.html describe how to make your own bokashi bran.
• http://turning2green.co.uk/blog/?p=809 and http://blogkashi.blogspot.com/2008/10/bokashi-buckets.html describe different ways to make your own bokashi bin (the recycled-plastic purpose-built one I have was by far the most expensive part of my kit)
• http://bokashiworld.wordpress.com/ and http://bokashislope.blogspot.com/ are the most detailed blogs I found devoted to the topic
• http://bokashislope.blogspot.com/2010/12/fail-bucket-in-ten-easy-steps.html is a detailed what-not-to-do list
• http://vermicomposters.ning.com/forum/topics/bokashi-worms-grubs-oh-my talks about how to mix bokashi and worm composting successfully
• The wiki entry on bokashi composting is very brief, but there's a lot of detail in the entry about the commercially-available starter culture EM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_microorganism

I'm a little disappointed to learn that I could have made a DIY bucket for a fraction of the cost, but I'm stoked to get started right away! 


Day 1 (March 8th): Unfortunately the stuff I had set aside - limp salad, forgotten brussels sprouts - had started to grow black mold, so can't be used in the bokashi (At a future date I'll experiment with killing all the mold spores by baking it in the oven, then cooling it and adding it to the bokashi - but I was not feeling that brave for my very first bucket). So I layered in some bokashi bran and what turns out to be a pitiful amount of leftover pasta. Hmm, I need to have more stuff per layer.


Day 3:  I waited a couple of days and deliberately made fruit salad so I could get a decent layer of peels down. When I opened the box, there was a little condensation on the lid, and some white fuzz on top of the bokashi bran layer, which I fervently hoped was yeast and not an aerobic mold. Just in case, I added three generous handfuls of bokashi bran on top of this layer (which is probably 2/3 banana peels). And made a mental note that the resulting mixture is still quite dry, so I should aim for more veggies and moisture in the next batch of scraps.


I used an extra-large freezer bag partly filled with dried peas as my top layer to limit air exposure:

Day 4: husband threw in the fruits of an experiment in making whole-wheat bagels that went horribly awry. No bran, very dry, no effort to cover completely with my bag of peas. (Sigh.) He did report a pleasant yeasty smell in container.


Day 5: made fruit salad, so had lots of peels to add to the bokashi. Woohoo!


Day 6 through 15: a car accident (I'm okay, just mild whiplash and lots of paperwork), plus out-of-town guests, meant we've done lots of eating out and nothing has been added to the bin. Some of our food scraps went to regular garbage, some into the freezer for storage.


Day 16 (24 March): opened the bin at then end of our week of benign neglect to find no mold and a smell pleasantly reminiscent of pickles, so my improvised bag-o-peas is doing the trick at excluding air. The mixture is really dry still, so when I added my scraps I put in an extra cup of water to help things along. Also: we've spied a compost tumbler at Costco for a paltry $120 or so. How wonderful that they've come down in price! We'll snag one for ourselves next trip for the post-bokashi-pre-garden processing.


Day 20: Drained my first batch of compost tea: two-thirds of a cup! W00T! And hit publish on this post, which I'll continue to update periodically...


Who else has tried bokashi composting? How'd it go for you?