Link Love

While I'm still focused on rebuilding, others are doing more exciting things with bokashi:

http://myfanwe.xanga.com/755077309/bokashi-books-and-broody-hens/ This industrious blogger collected windfall citrus to add to bokashi. “After” photos here, with a link to the “before” post included.

http://harlemgarden.org/tag/bokashi/ A community garden program that offers classes in vermicomposting and bokashi? Okay, probably a bit of commute, but...

http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/11432/build-an-outdoor-bokashi-worm-composting-bin In my next life, I am going to be a carpenter! This box is so much prettier than anything I've made.

http://sustainabilityquest.blogspot.com/2011/09/kitchen-bokashi-series-part-4.html A nice instructional series with clear writing and clear photos from a site worth exploring for more than just bokashi.

And “waiting on the rainy season”perfectly describes my situation, too.

DSF

image is linked from Palmer Web Marketing, who would probably appreciate it if you checked them out.

Got K-Cups?

[sorry for the formatting—I'm having blogger issues again. Image from espressoplanet, no connection though I lost some time browsing their offerings.]

Single-serve = more packaging. I know. And K-cups are ridiculously easy to throw away, all neatly packed even after use, while being nearly impossible to dispose of responsibly.

If only they didn't make such good coffee! -G-

So the workplace now has a Keurig. It also has two Solofill reusable filter-cups, but I'm the only one who'll use those; everyone else uses the packaged cups. Before I started agitating for folks to toss their K's into the compost collector [“my worms are hungry! Please feed them your tea bags, fruit peels, etc.”], I figured I'd better make sure the foil-topped plastic cups with coffee and filter inside were, in fact, bucketable.

Turns out...they're not suitable for a standard bokashi bucket. (As a general note to myself for future experiments: Impermeable additions mess with bucket health. Treat separately if at all.) Nor all that desirable for my bucket-alternatives. Even leaving the chemical concerns out of it, plastic in a slow compost pile is never recommended; it will break down into smaller pieces, but not truly degrade. The worms don't appreciate foil, though it isn't enough to make them flee from an otherwise suitable planter, but it takes a surprisingly long while for any worm to get brave enough to wriggle into a cup, and in the meantime, other critters may decide to colonize. Bad enough having to remove slightly degraded plastic cups from your vermicompost, but a cup full of centipedes? Eek! Repulsive doesn't mind them if the foil's torn a bit, and cohabitation's far less of a concern there, but small cups can hold waer, which could stagnate, and then there's the mucky mostly-intact plastic to fish out of the grubbery. Ick. And Ugh.

If you take the foil off the top, the worms are happier, though the other concerns still apply. Sigh. I scrounged a covered tray that would fit half a dozen or so unlidded used K-cups; spritzed EM/AEM/AIM on the UCG and let it ferment for BSF bait or “breath freshener” or compost boosters—nice fermentation, but in order to use the stuff, you still have to separate the organics from the plastic. Let me just say, it's a pain: the filter's glued into place. I resorted to kitchen shears.

And gave up on trying to salvage the organics from them in any organized sense. Hey, I divert my own UCG, isn't that good enough?

...which argument would sit less uneasily on my tongue if not for the fact that the workplace Keurig is actually my personal property, installed there for office use because I could.

Oops.

Better than shredding

Pages from phone books end up in my post-bokashi scernarios a lot, but that's because they're here. I'd much rather not receive the plastic-wrapped doorstops at all.


Do. Not. Want.

Eat Your Words?

Friend of mine sent me a link to this great piece on Treehugger.

And now I'm thinking about green art installations again. My new job involves lots of paper, and a more anti-recycling place you'd be hard pressed to imagine (I'm working on it!)...perhaps a wall of old meeting minutes growing woodears? Hardly a Garden of Knowledge, but perhaps a learning opportunity.

Also, mushrooms are yummy. -G-

just because

Nothing to do with bokashi, but somehow, it still seems to fit.

Wormy Christmas!

...and a fermented new year, too. Happy holidays from all of us at bucketville, and may your buckets, too, be busy.

DSF

image from a great post on MomLogic!

You say tomato...

What's green, grows in the garden, and is either a dangerous though necessary infrastructure or a delicious vegetable depending on who you ask?

The tomato plant. Specifically, tomato leaves.

My grandmother taught me to garden and to compost, and a lot of what I know about cooking as well. So now and then I tell her about my more amusing container-gardening experiences, offering stories as partial payment for all the lessons then and now. A few weeks ago, she mentioned almost in passing that you can eat tomato leaves.

I'm sure you could have heard my response for a quarter-mile all around. Why didn't anyone tell me? All that produce, wasted. I'd always thought they were toxic, you see, nightshade and all that. But one of my favorite teachers in the art of surviving life vouches for their edibility, so I went searching for the full story.

Don't have it yet, but I have enough: yes, they are edible, and worth eating, though not everyone's sure or willing to say for the record that they're safe. Still, I found enough in academic journals and newspapers, reprinted family histories and even a few old recipes to decide it was safe enough for me. Within reason. Hey, my grandmother's fed me a lot of good food over the years... And besides, while I did see a whole lot of "tomato leaves will kill you" warnings, none of them were from what I consider really reputable sources, no scientific studies on animal or person.

Some newer publications say that tomato leaves have tomatine, not the solanine usually listed as a toxin, and more than one source points out the lack of verified cases of poisoning by tomato leaf, though there are many from related plants that do contain solanine. Upon first broadening my search beyond the scientific sites, two page views of the general-audience Aggie horticultural site gave me two different versions of a secondary-crop list of common garden vegetables, one of which has tomatoes listed only as a fruit, because "the leaves contain alkaloids," the other of which had only a line in the box where that caution had first been.

Hmm.

All right, I thought, let's assume tomato leaves are in fact edible without risk and move on. Citations? Recipes?

To judge by the scarcity of information it's not too common, but that's the same reasoning that once led historians to assume that no one ate salads in the Dark Ages--some things simply don't get written down. Which does not explain why the information wasn't passed hand to hand, as it were. If they are edible, why are they so overlooked even by subsistence-level famers in areas where the plants are native or at least easy to grow? But then, one could ask the same about carrot tops. Yes, you can eat those, too.

As far as adding tomato leaves to the menu, the general recommendation seems to be that they are a suitable food only for adults (an odd prohibition but not unique). Are they really safe? There's a NYT article about eating tomato leaves, that quoted a book on toxic plants as saying one would have to eat a whole pound before worrying over possible toxins, as if that's incomprehensible, though anyone who's ever watched a pile of spinach cook down to nothing knows better.

By now fairly certain a few wouldn't hurt me, I gave them a try. Raw, they are not for me, though that's more to do with texture than the taste, a bright, almost grassy green with a backbite rather like arugula. Maybe one baby leaf, minced, alone or mixed with chives to top a cold dish, but not torn up for a salad green. The large, dark bottom leaves are too tough to bother with. But that still leaves a whole lot of potential cooking greens sprawling through my garden. And they're pretty yummy.

Recipes are few and far between, but anecdotes can be found, so I turned up a few uses without too much effort. The older, less juicy fresh leaves can be used as a wrap for cheeses during curing. The dried leaves were sometimes used to extend other dried herbs, and as a substitute for parsely in seasoning mixes, I'd guess because drying the leaves took no extra effort when one hung whole tomato plants for ripening, an old trick once again coming into favor: harvest the plant, hang it roots-up away from light and with lots of air, and tomatoes will continue to ripen on the vine.

Medium-sized fresh leaves can be blanched for a few seconds and added to sauces and purees; they are cooked as your basic pot herb (I am so tired of the ubiquitous instruction to "cook as spinach," which I'm convinced is written by cooks who have never used the green in question). Those without my objection to the texture eat them raw when young and tender. Far and away the most frequently cited English-language use of tomato leaves I found was their addition to canned or otherwise bland tomato sauce to improve the flavor, removed before serving, often in combination with other herbs in a string bundle, sometimes alone. And a few regional uses from the NYT article linked above offer ideas I have not yet had the chance to try.

My last-season tomato plant has mostly given up on flowering for the year, but that doesn't mean I’m through with it. I've a few recent romas waiting for fate to find them, and there’s a recipe I'd like to try...after which, I'm calling my grandmother to ask for any of her old recipes that use tomato leaves. 'Cause I've got a lot of years of missed greens to make up for!


DSF


[image from Flowers VG]

It's not a teapot, and you're no dormouse!

I’ve been working all the hours of the night and day the past few weeks, so the garden’s barely gotten a rueful nod on my way by. Still haven’t completely converted all my pots to clay pot irrigation or SIP, and between heat and neglect I did lose a couple of plants not so equipped, but only a couple—as in two or three. Which is amazing, what with our string of unendingly hot days broken up by only one far-too-light rain.

Drought’s not been the problem, but that’s not to say the garden hasn’t been beset by trials. Locusts, the neighborhood dogs, daily temperatures so high some tender leaves can actually cook on the plants, water or no water...and to those expected ills, add this: I’m back to fighting possums. At least a trio of young ones, too brazen for their own good and still small enough that one actually managed to get briefly stuck inside an irrigation pitcher!

I’m not sure what the appeal there was; the bit of water shoudln’t have drawn interest with the aquarium bucket* nearby, and all my irrigation reservoirs are lidded to prevent mosquitos from using them as hatcheries, so there shouldn’t have been larvae or anything. Clay does cool water, and soil’s cooling as well, so perhaps it was the difference in temperature when the blasted prehistoric rodentalogue dislodged the lid. Whatever the reason it decided to stick its pointy head and front half into a clay tube, it had a noisy pre-dawn time getting back out, and now there’s green sap and shredded leaves where I used to have a thriving sweet potato vine. (It may recover, but that’s not the point.)

That half-suicidal pouch-rat or one of its compatriots disturbed my “precomposting” worm-food, too. Or perhaps it took several of them working in concert; by the mess, a whole gang of adolescent rat-tailed terrors had a party. Have I mentioned lately that I have no use for possums? Horrible things. Part of the local ecosystem they may be, but once they disturb my garden, they’re pests.

Technically edible pests, but while I may fantasize about roasted possum on a grape-leaf lined platter with a guava in its mouth for decoration, that’s vengeance, not epicurianism, speaking.

I can handle the monkeys-debating-politics sounds of racoons in mating season; the sudden thunder of squirrels using rooftiles as trampolines; even the occasional bird-denuded grapevine seems an acceptable price to pay for living in a city green enough to have such a varied wifdlife still.

But possums in the pots? That’s just too much for me. Time to set out the Hav-A-Hart, I think. Wonder if I could bait it with Repulsive-bits? Possums do seem to enjoy them, and at least it’d be free...

DSF

random lol

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Cleaning House

I've been offline a lot lately, what with one thing and another. Fortunately, bokashi'ing and gardening have been among those things, so I have things to post about! But first a topic I keep forgetting to put up: using EM for cleaning.


If you buy your EM bokashi bran pre-mixed, you may be missing out. I began this ever-growing project with a bottle of liquid EM inoculant (cheaper and available locally, so there was no need to wait for delivery). Having the liquid EM around, of course I had to try some of the beyond-the-garden uses for the stuff!


Folks, you wouldn't believe some of the things people do with their EM. It's mixed into ceramic donuts and balls that are then added to pools and ponds to help clarify and purify the water. Used as a foliar feed for plants, mixed into drinking water for pets and livestock as well as a supplement to chicken feed, added to household cleansers, used as a cleanser itself, and even mixed into toothpastes and mouthwash.


Oh, did I forget the drinks? There are whole teahouse-like establishments devoted to EM products in Asia, and bottled drinks increasingly for sale in the West. As well as several sites where one can find recipes for brewing one's own from that same bottle of EM-1 used to make "magic bran."


While I have, out of curiosity, tasted freshly made AEM, I haven't yet gone so far as to make a beverage out of it. But I have used the spray as a deodorizer for the apartment trash bins, and upon seeing how very successful that was, experimented a bit with some of the other cleaning uses. While I don't find that it's a viable substitute for a proper cleanser on its own (maybe my floors and shower are excessively dirty?), it does seem to discourage the reappearance of mildew--no small feat!--and keep things clean longer than the cleansers alone.


It even works in the laundry. The usual retailer advice is not to use EM on dark fabrics, and judging by what happens to kitchen sponges, I'd say it's unwise to challenge that. But EM works very well to get kitchen towels clean, as well as the kitchen sink; even without hot water, there's no musty smell nor stains. And a strong dilution of AEM is far and away the best fridge-cleaner I have ever found! Safe for use on food, too, which is one less cause for concern when attempting to clean up a minor fridge spill.


One of these days, I really am going to have try an EM-X drink. At this stage in my life, I can't imagine that ingesting a few more soil-borne bacteria could hurt me!

Coolest thing EVER!

http://www.coolersolutionsinc.com/sustainable/portfolio/bio.php



Okay, the French Press is up there. Ditto the jacuzzi. And I admit to a fondness for contact lenses, refrigerators, indoor heat and sanitation. But, c'mon, an office greenspace/bokashi bin? Two words:

I.

WANT.

Though it looks like I may have to do the non-retail thing for this as well--not only as the original would likely cost the earth, but because I can find no US equivalent of the Canadian company introducing this thing.

Sigh. And here I've only just got the office-mates to agree to try natural air freshening plants instead of those headache- and cough-inducing Glade Plug-Ins.

And that took a month-long campaign! I began by scattering leaves of lemon verbena or scented geranium on my desk. Anyone who asked was informed they were from my garden. "Rose geraniums make lovely indoor plants, too." After a while, it became something of a joke, with coworkers asking about the plant of the day. Then I skipped a few days, until someone asked me to start again. And finally I offered to bring in some plants. If no one minded, naturally. The response was uniformly positive, though only truly eager in a few cases, and with definite preferences as to the scents and kind of plants. (Which is why I brought in different sorts, you see.)

So I'm far from a biowall. But, oh, I do want one! Or two. Can I replace my cubicle?

Beyond the Corral

Wastewater folks call it FOG: fats, oils, and grease. One of the major causes of sewage blockages, which release pollutants, interrupt service, and are incredibly expensive to clean up, FOG is more even of a concern now than ever, between older infrastructure, increasing demand, and, unfortunately, certain water-conservation methods.

Some municipalities have programs to collect household FOG waste for conversion to biodiesel. Mine... does not. Austin and Houston recommend that residents throw their waste grease and oil in the trash.

Need I say that I'm not pleased by this?

Oddly, despite the municipally sanctioned advice to trash all FOG, the City of Austin does, in fact, accept used oil and cooking grease at one location--and, according to the website http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/sws/dispose_oil.htm , "Oil collected will be reprocessed into biodiesal [sic]or other environmentally-friendly products such as soap."

So, no collection service offered, but if you're sufficiently motivated to add some road miles to your conservation efforts, they'll take care of the rest. Does this seem a bit strange to anyone?

Zero Waste is a long, long way away!

What does this have to do with bokashi? Not a thing, directly. But those grease-soaked paper towels can go in the bucket instead of the trash, and bokashi juice--the microbe-rich effluent produced during fermentation--helps keep drains clear. As for the larger quantities of grease and oil, if you're sufficiently mechanical, you might make your own bio-diesel, or candles, bird-feeding bars, etc. Hey, what about bacon soap?

...you know, assuming your kitchen generates sufficient bacon grease for that.

Where does he think food comes from?

Haven't posted much lately, I know. Sorry. Health issues in part, plus the fact that it's just been too pretty to be at a keyboard even if I had bokashi-related things to post (which this post isn't, so don't say I didn't warn you). And then there's the fact that it's loquat season.

Don't know the loquat? You're not alone. Here in the US, this delicious fruit is a sadly under-appreciated "backyard crop"; if you don't grow it yourself, chances are you won't ever have the chance to eat the things. Except possibly canned and imported from another country.

(Oddly, Texas chain grocer HEB carries loquats in syrup in its upscale house brand. According to the label, it's a Product of Mexico.)

This relative of roses and apples is delicious raw or cooked, and here in Austin, is easy enough to grow that many people--sadly, not including me!--can harvest bushels of fruits even from potted specimens. Given a sunny spot in the ground, fruits are nearly inevitable. Even in drought years. That photo above is a fair representation of a tree/bush in fruit; seasonal abundance in spades!

But people here don't eat the things. Sold as a zone-hardy evergreen ornamental, nursery and catalog listings tend not to mention the fruits at all. The word "edible" almost never appears on labels. And as far as which species makes the best fresh-eating or cooking use, forget it. Why should growers bother to include that information? It's not as if anyone grows them for the fruit...

I have a dozen or so tested and proved loquat recipes, and friends with loquats and freezer space, so I've been playing in yards and kitchens all over the city. Have a tree with ripe fruits? Great! I'll be right over. Let me take some home, and in exchange I'll fill your freezer, oven, food drier, etc. Really. Anything to avoid having to see those yummy fruits rotting on or beneath the tree.

Jonathan Bloom over at Wasted Food promotes community-based gleaning. A great idea! But though I wish it would, I don't believe it would work for loquats. Like mulberries, loquats are simply not considered worthwhile, here, as a food, even by most of those who know they can be eaten.

I've been trying to wrap my head around that for years. Mulberries, I can kind of understand, more or less, if I try--depending on the species and growing conditions, they can be rather bland. (Though they're an easy way to add sweetness to baked goods, and mulberry "raisins" are surprisingly tasty additions to a great many recipes.) But loquats? Delicious, sweet-tart, juicy Japanese plums? Lovely sunset-colored biwa? Incredibly floral-fruity Chinese Medlars? How could anyone choose not to eat these?

Doesn't matter what name you give them, the attitude here doesn't change. I'm hoping Frieda's or some similar exotic-foods emporium will adopt the things, because last year, someone finally articulated the problem in a way even I can understand:

"If it was food," he told me, sneering as I offered him a freshly-picked loquat half dripping with juice, "it would be at the grocery store."

Talking Bokashi

"Go on," my friend said, "ask her." My friend's friend rolled his eyes but obediently asked me what I'm doing with all my buckets.

"...Bokashi? What's that?"

"Two-stage composting," I answered.

He nodded, said that he didn't garden, and the conversation moved on.

Argh!

In the six months or so since I began this blog--and started talking about my microherding adventures--that exchange has happened more than a few times. Bokashi? Oh, um, sounds...interesting. Hey, how about those Cowboys?

I've tried other answers, none any more satisfying; some of my half-correct definitions are more engagingly phrased than others, depending on the audience, but none of them really work yet.

Bokashi?

...Pickled compost, sort of... Um, yeah. Next?


...making plant food out of leftover people-food--hey, wait, come back! I wasn't finished...


...The urban answer to composting.

That one gets a decent response, though only from gardeners. People who know about different sorts of composting ask questions about advantages, costs, or procedure; the ones who know only that composting is something they ought to be doing ask about costs and learning curves; those who've chosen other routes...well, you get the idea.

It's the non-gardeners I can't reach with that response (or any other). "Recycling food" just sounds wrong; I won't even try. Ditto "on-site waste handling"! So how do you talk to the basic non-gardening urbanite about bokashi?

Or rather, how do I convince them to give it a try?

Do Composters Consume More Produce?

I admit it, I like convenience. Who doesn’t? But to me, a grapefruit’s pretty convenient already--comes packaged in its own compostable carrying case, doesn’t need refrigeration or heating before serving, available in single- or two-serving sizes and a range of colors with several local and organic varieties available in season…

My work lunch today--if I ever get to eat it!--will be a fruit bowl: peeled and diced citrus in several varieties, tossed with lime juice and a bit of sugar to make up for the rather insipid too-cheap-to-pass-up navel orange (now I know why they were so cheap -G-). Normally, I’d simply have tossed a grapefruit in my bag, but I’ve missed lunch the past couple of days, snatching handfuls of nuts or a couple of cookies to nibble on instead. Not good for my health, and really a shame with all the lovely real food I have on hand. So I chopped up my citrus into bite-sized pieces I can nibble on if there’s no time for more.

In theory, anyway.

The prepping left me with a pile of citrus peelings I had neither the time nor the inclination to do anything with at that hour of the morning, so they went into the bokashi bucket. Over time, they’ll be converted into plant food, to nourish more produce for me to eat. (I do grow the odd not-a-crop plant, but mostly I’m a kitchen-oriented gardener.)

Tossing the peels and bits into the bucket, it occured to me to wonder if maybe I buy whole produce, rather than pre-prepped, in part because I actually want the “waste” for my composting.

Did I buy less fresh produce in the pre-bucket days? I cannot now recall, but it seems likely, if only because I cook more now that I have no disposal-guilt. Which, now that I see it all typed out, looks very strange.

Oh, well. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I shall no longer be tempted, if ever I was, to buy this. My buckets need feeding!

January Greens

I had cleavers with my black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day.

Black-eyed peas are a traditional item on that day—I’m told they represent luck, and sometimes money, at least if someone cooked them with a penny in the pot. The cleavers came out of my (well, the apartment’s) flowerbed. And I don’t know what they’re supposed to symbolize in this case, except that the weather’s being a tad bit odd even for here. Cleavers are a spring weed! Among the earliest of edible greenstuffs, they were widely appreciated for that reason in the days before all food came from the grocery store*. Old European herbals list “spring tonics” for health and beauty consisting largely of eating all the cleavers (Galium aparine) you could find for a week, and the modern urban forager/wildcrafter folks still list it as a cleansing/tonic herb.

While the attribute from which they take their common name makes cleavers no one’s favorite raw vegetable, a brief blanching subdues their clinging hairs while maintaining most of their nutrients, so that’s what I did with my first-of-the-year trove. Stir-frying works fairly well, too, especially with black sesame oil added after cooking. One of these days I may try some a la wilted lettuce salad, if it’s going to keep popping up for the next few months. Typically its season lasts about five weeks from first appearance, but typically, that first appearance is sometime after Valentine’s and before St. Patrick’s Day.

Why clutter up my (mostly) bokashi blog with a post about a foodstuff I didn’t even plant? Because it’s not time for cleavers yet. I’m a gardener, though a landless one; weather matters to me. Not, granted, as much as to a farmer, but still. Some plants want to be sowed only after all danger of frost has passed. Other seeds, I may need to stick in the freezer for a few weeks. Pyracantha should only be harvested after a sustained hard freeze—have the few dips below 32 we’ve had been enough, or too much? Should I give up on plans for firethorn sauce this year?

And what about the curing and composting bokashi? I have a batch of compost-amended soil that should be ready at the end of this month, and a minimal-soil experiment that looks like it will be, though I’d intended it to be just-in-time for this year’s first planting. When is that in a clime where an afternoon in the mid-seventies can be followed by snow, Christmas is shirtsleeve-weather, and the first heralds of spring show up for New Years Day?

I’d planned on hydroponic lettuce and herbs so I could have greens in February, but right now, I’m tempted to direct-sow those seeds into soil. There’s no way this glorious springlike temperature will remain, though.

...is there?

All the weather changes lately are making me queasy. Does that make my skin a January green?

DSF


*Yes, I know it doesn’t. But too many of my fellow citizens don’t seem to. Which is a subject for another post [read: rant] or three.

Is compost the answer?

That depends. What’s the question again?

CAPCOG is the state designated planning agency for solid waste management issues in this region, and since I’d really like to know what’s planned, I’ve been exploring their website.

Household compostables are still the forgotten stepchild, but there are some (too limited) facilities in place for composting presorted grocery wastes and food scraps from cafeterias through at least one public/private partnership. And it turns out that TxDot—the Texas Department of Transportation—uses compost in its roadside landscaping. In great quantities, even.

There’s a PowerPoint presentation about it—those folks do seem to like their slides—which is where the title of this post came from.

I find it hard to fathom that this really is a question, but a look at that presentation serves to remind me that not everyone is as much a fan of compost as I. Good or bad PR? Yikes! How could using compost possibly be perceived as a bad thing? But then there’s the boldface on these captions

Compost IS NOT:
raw sewage sludge or manure

Compost IS:
a pasteurized, pathogen free, organic soil amendment

(Note that “pasteurized” only applies to hot compost, though it is wholly correct to use here, and that the word “organic” is technically true though not, perhaps, in the same sense as it will be read.)

Which I guess answers the question—compost could be perceived as “unclean” by those who do not understand the process, who think that all trash is filthy, and all those things consigned to the bin or heap are dirty.

In the bad sense of the word. –G–

Are the pro-compost people unintentionally undermining my small efforts, and those of my larger-scale peers, with their compost=pasteurized material equation? Possibly, though not necessarily; bokashi can be thermophilically treated, it simply need not be.

But I wonder if that equation might be part of the reason that Austin, unlike other green cities, does not subsidize residential compost bins (traditional, anaerobic, vermicompost, and/or bokashi).

Hmm. An answer leading to new questions; somehow, that fits.

DSF

It is winter, right?

Feeling very much the gardener this December weekend as I carefully push the fallen leaves away from the stems of my young greens, harvest the next-to-last (I’ve said that before!) bit of arugula, set up the insulating globe for my tenderest potted herb, and decide to let the radishes keep going awhile longer. Venturing beyond my bucket garden, I’m planning on a collecting jaunt tomorrow, for spanish moss, holly, and mistletoe—the latter two for seasonal decoration, the first for a small venturing into hydroponics with EM, so I can have fresh lettuce and basil in February without going bankrupt. The last bucket of cured bokashi has been transferred to its planter, this time with barely-qualifies-as-dirt clay soil above and below and a measure of mature compost mixed into the bokashi middle layer. The apartment composter is open for contributions, complete with a sign in the laundry room explaining what not to add. And my place smells of rosemary, fresh as can be had and wonderfully fragrant and savory.

It’s hard to remember that we’ve had below-freezing temperatures and even a bit of snow, when the afternoon high nears seventy and the roses are going strong. Repulsive’s aggregate numbers are much reduced, but the curing bokashi started right back up again after the temperature rebounded, not even requiring a fresh infusion of microbes.

Winter’s traditionally down-time for composters, but I’m planning on bokashi’ing straight through the cold season. If and when it comes to stay. -G- Yet another benefits of the bucket: not only is it accessible in inclement weather, it’s apparently resilient enough to weather a brief freeze unhindered. And it’s easy to restart should it stall. Unlike, say, an outdoor wormery.

Imagine greeting spring with quantities of fresh-but-matured compost ready to nourish the garden!

Not too chilled, but still dreaming of spring...

DSF

Recent bokashi sightings

Bokashi's spreading slowly here in the US, or so it seems. But Google, at least, finds more occurrences of the word now than it did a few months ago (and not all from this blog!). About.com's Organic Gardening section has a post as of Dec 01. The Bokashi in Australia livejournal community has a poll. Don't know how long Appropedia's had an entry on bokashi, but it's just been updated. And The Recycle Works has a podcast all about EM.

Which I guess is less a sighting than a hearing. Oh, well. Back to my buckets I go--I'm going to insulate a curing one, I think, see what happens.

DSF

RRR...RRR

The Three Six Rs

Ever heard of CAPCOG?

Neither had I, but I’m glad they exist—the Capitol Area Council of Governments handles issues that cross local county lines, from maintaining mapping systems for 9-1-1 to providing direct access to services for the elderly and beyond. From Homeland Security for a ten-county area to Waste Reduction Planning, all coordinated and cooperating.

Invisibly, to great degree.

Particularly in Texas, county of residence can be more important than city (and cities often span several counties). And there are areas of general concern for, say, the residents of Central Texas that don’t much affect those in the panhandle, or vice versa; I find it reassuring to learn that the obvious need for some mid-level association is being addressed by so-appropriately-named COGs.

But mostly, I’m happy to learn about my local COG’s efforts regarding waste reduction. I had been distressed by how little has been done to remove organics from the waste stream, and dissatisfied with airy promises of “Zero Waste”* achievements at some far-future date. CAPCOG has specific information, plans and past agendas, all accessible online should you know where to look.

And now, I do. This site is perhaps most useful for its new and frequently updated area map of recycling facilities—frugal eco-conscious Austinites should especially appreciate the dollar signs showing locations where recyclable materials may be sold!—but that’s certainly not all it has to offer.

Among other interesting materials on the website is a simple, not-too-new PowerPoint document. You’ve heard of The Three Rs—Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—but at least as far back as 2005, CAPCOG was discussing six:

*Reduce (source reduction)
*Redesign
*Repair (fix)
*Reuse (durable vs. disposable, as for example cameras and napkins)
*Recycle (everything else)
*Regulate


That final R may be beyond my reach. But isn’t it nice to know it’s on somebody’s radar?

There are several other interesting slides in that presentation, including the twelve master categories of material found in landfills and their percentages. And from their example plan, courtesy of the ever-forward Palo Alto, CA, comes my new rallying cry, conveniently for my post-title also composed largely of initial Rs:

Regional Resource Recovery Parks. Municipality-provided locations for the creation or expansion of privately or publicly run reuse, recycling, and composting businesses.

My neighborhood really, really, rrreally needs a bokashi farm…

DSF