Okay, so I'm slow. It took me a while to realize that I'd gone from taking small bags of trash out every day or couple of days to taking tiny, mostly-empty bags of trash out every day or couple of days. And even longer to actually think about it, to wonder why I was still having to take out the trash every other day when I was pickling all my food waste.
Surely there wasn't anything left in there to smell bad?
But there was: cat food. The household feline prefers disgustingly gloppy commercial wet food, set out a spoonful at a time a couple of times a day by way of reassurance or treat or whatever. Usually, she eats it all, but now and then a bit escapes her, and in Texas, it goes bad quite quickly.
I'm not all that comfortable feeding the stuff to her anyway, though it's what she likes, and apparently my mind just couldn't stretch to encompass the thought of adding any remaining scraps and scrapings to my buckets. To my compost. To my garden. To me.
Maybe that's overly squeamish, but there it is. So the cat food is getting its very own micro-bucket, its contents destined for some non-gardening application, or at least not food gardening. On its own, gloppy wet food does not produce bokashi juice, though it does ferment; I think a compostable inner bucket should be a possibility. So that's the next test. Using a newspaper seedling pot, I think.
The buckets, they breed!
DSF
[image from http://icanhascheezburger.com/category/bukkit/page/2/]
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2 comments:
Hi D.S. We are a vegan household right? Except one thing, those ungrateful cats just refuse to eat tofu! ;D And I really think it is a good idea to give them some wet food on a regular basis. Our old one needs the added moisture and it makes it easier to slip them some meds down the road if you need to. Plus who wants to live on kibble alone! But it does get kind of gross, with the food dishes and nasty little bits of cat food in the sink. :p But I wouldn't worry about making compost out of it. That's what old ma nature does with leftover food, animal or vegetable. Another thought. You could put it down the toilet. Eaten or uneaten...
Down the toilet???
Actually, around here that’s not an unreasonable method; Austin’s wastewater folks make Dillo Dirt from sludge. And at small volumes, it’s not likely to cause problems in the pipes or anything. But it would never have occurred to me—I try not to think about the stuff, and have always just tossed away any remains as quickly and blindly as possible.
To the point of sometimes buying disposable plates for it, though then I feel guilty about creating that much waste by using “a whole plate” for a tablespoon of bits-n-sauce. (Okay, so with bokashi I could compost it plate and all, but it’s still probably better for the poor, beleagured planet to scrape and wash a reusable plate.)
But I’m still too squeamish to think of that drek anywhere in my food-cycle. Give it a few years to break down first. Moldy and spoiled foods I’m okay with pickling/composting, they were at least fit for human consumption once, but that glop...no. La gata’s chosen foods are nearly all products that make me queasy to contemplate. And, no, tofu’s no part of her menu, either.
Not even in aspic, though she’d likely lick away the glop if it were flavored correctly.
DSF
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