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.

Tales from the Bucket: Dirt Nap

Dirt Nap

No, that's not the reason I've been silent (fortunately), but the current bokashi-bucket tweak.

Some disciplined container gardeners "rest" mixes between use in order to prevent pathogen transfer, discourage insects, and limit the spread of pot-weeds. I'm not often that disciplined--typically, if I have a container full of potting mix, there are three plants on hand I could put in it! But this hasn't been a typical year.

There's a depth factor for sun-sterilization, and I haven't bothered with anything like proper procedure, but something like fifty days of 100+ heat and sun, following after yet another season of drought, has left a bunch of pots filled with dry mixes but largely devoid of life. Plant, animal, insect, or, just possibly, microbe.

Obviously, can't have that. Not at the house of buckets. -G- The usual procedure for using bokashi in container mixes is simply to layer mature bokashi between inches of soil-based mix, but that assumes a mix that's damp enough to work with. I'm not planning on watering dirt weeks before planting-time! We're under watering restrictions.

Understand, we're talking dry, dry former soil, some of it baked into rocklike chunks and the rest all dust and flyaway clumps. I did try digging a hole, scooping some bokashi in, and filling it back up; but the dirt was so resistant to absorption that it was still all powdery when the crepuscular scavengers came by for dinner... The only saving grace was that it was easy to clean up; just took a broom.

So now I'm doing the initial bucket-fermentation stage with that dry-as-ashes dirt.

Call this an advanced technique, because I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a beginner! There's a decent chance it will fail according to one of my basic criteria: presence of insects, due to eggs or estivating critters. Or even, if you have a deep enough pot that some moisture remained in the bottom, worms. Verne and company are only really welcome outdoors; I can tolerate a closed wormery indoors in some circumstances, but would rather not. And they don't tolerate the pH in a working bucket, so they have to be carefully repotted once hatched or revived.

There's also a more-than-slight chance of starting a hot-composting reaction in the container, not necessarily a problem but certainly something to watch. (I'm mostly thinking about the paper towels soaked in bacon grease, or the glistening fast-food bags, and wondering just how thick the soil layer has to be to exclude the oxygen a fire would need.)

And if you're fermenting things generally not considered compostable in a home setting--that is to say, meats--there's always the need to ensure a quick and thorough fermentation, and that can be a bit more difficult with changing volumes of organics and inorganics. In practice, that means you may have to more actively manage the planter-bucket than you would a more standard bokashi bucket set-up. Not too much work, mainly a matter of juggling additions to be sure you have a few inches of fermentables all at once, with AEM. Still, one more thing to pay attention to, as opposed to the standard "dump, cover, forget" easier-than-trashing method.

But on the positive side, this entire bucket-to-garden technique uses no water beyond the cup or so to mix up sufficient AEM or bokashi bran for a single bucket/planter. There's no draining required (usually). And at the end, if you've been sufficiently generous with your ratios, you have a bucket full of just-moist-enough, oddly pickle-scented soil-and-fertilizer mix ready to be inoculated with worms or dumped into next season's raised beds or containers on top of a layer of leaves and poor soil, and covered to rest again until planting-time.

Only this resting time, the microbes are all awake and chomping. The fall tomato bed's starting to look really nice, and the first bed I constructed with this stuff is growing nice, bushy basil on only two quarts of greywater per plant per week (olla pots, naturally).

Basic procedure:

If you've got a deep container full of dirt, may as well use that. Bag the base in case of seepage or bugs.

*Partially empty or fill container so it's about half filled with dessicated soil.
*Apply EM as in a standard bucket.
*Add fermentables and EM as usual, at least a few inches worth.
*Add one inch dry soil.
*Repeat until out of soil or space.
*Lest rest until a nice thick acetobacter mat connects the whole.

Note that the top layer of soil should be moist at an inch down after about a day, from absorption. If it is not at least damp, add a small bit of moisture. Very small, and not too soon.

Don't forget to keep this covered! It may not look like a standard bokashi bucket, but it's still fermenting in there. I covered one working soil-bucket simply with a plastic bag, figuring the soil would work to exclude oxygen. Came home to an apartment permeated with Eau de Pickle Factory Explosion.

Really a better idea to do this outside, but 1) the heat outside my door would dry the fermentables before the microbes could do their thing, and 2) I'm too lazy to carry my kitchen waster across the threshhold even once a day. Easier to keep the bucket next to the garbage and recycling. Covered. Lesson learned.


So far, I haven't used the resulting white-threaded enriched soil for direct-planting, but I'm planning to; I'll simply stop fermenting with three or four inches of space left in my planter, let the concoction rest, then top with an olla pot and transplant in moistened unfermented potting mix.


This isn't exactly the all-in-one bucket I'm still dreaming of, and seeing as it requires horrible lifeless soil I'd rather not be in a position to ever use this technique again, but...did I mention toil-free basil in August? Hope for the fall garden even when all is dry and sere? And not having to rinse out bokashi buckets when it's 105 is also a plus, I think.

Hey, look: the garden's alive! And so is the blog.

Image from an article titled RIP: Recycle in Peace (Yes, that is an urn-planter!)

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.

A Repulsive new blog

Raise Soldier Flies.com

As backyard industries go, this one...seems to be doing pretty well. I admit to a serious case of NIMBY--both for the ick factor and because I know from experience that BSFL will eat my compost-in-progress, and I need my compost--but this is a great new resource for people interested in cultivating waste digesters on a large home-based scale.

(Cracks me up how many of the BSF folks go out and buy cracked corn to "sour" to use as bait for the things. Apparently, that's the standard local technique.)

Warning for the squeamish: photo- and video-heavy blog, necessarily including close-up images of larvae.

From teh Interwebs: A Repulsive Idea

An experiment I wouldn't have done, but a question I get asked fairly frequently--now I can just tell folks to go read about Heather's Repulsive BSF Adventure.

Blecch.

Tales from the Bucket: Time!

The folks over at Wriggly Wigglers asked how long it takes people to achieve compost from cured bokashi. Before, I would have said about a month. Now...yeah, about a month in warm weather, bit more in cool.

I do have to mention that there is some insect activity here, for the most part of the unseen and untroubling variety, but that’s to be expected in any “cold” compost situation. There is no odor aside from the faint forest-after-rain scent that good soil exudes, the giant possum lumbers right past the buckets on its (his? her?) way to wherever, and the gnats the bucket sometimes develop after being rained on will go away as soon as the top layer is disturbed. Snails and geckos may be more of a problem, depending on your area and tolerance for same.

If you’ve read more than a single post here, you already know that I live in an apartment and have no ground in which to sink a bottomless bucket for the conversion of bokashi into compost. So I’ve been experimenting with bringing the soil to the bokashi, rather than the other way around. It’s not necessarily an ideal solution for me—my supplies of soil are limited, and I have things growing in most of it—but it works.

This takes equal parts cured bokashi and soil, and I tend to use soil that isn’t at its peak but will still support plant growth (because my better soil has plants in it). The reading I did before first trying this was...confusing, shall we say, with some writers insisting on a minimum of ten gallons of soil per bucket of bokashi—if you assume that’s a five-gallon bucket, then two to one—and others using numbers familiar to me from traditional aerobic composing, though I’d never before seen them in relation to bokashi fermentation: “At least a cubic metre of soil” That’s something like twenty gallons. For one bucket of bokashi!

Not only do I not have that much soil, I haven’t got that kind of space. (Yes, that’s only the size of a large trash can. Still.) The reason for that figure in trad composting is to generate and sustain the desired thermophilic reaction—so the pile will heat up, destroying weed seeds, diseases, and other undesirables.

Hot compost isn’t feasible in small volumes without some technological intervention. Tumblers and activators, say. But my first bokashi buckets were vegetarian, none of them contained any weed seeds or diseased matter, and I don’t have any objection to cold compost for the most part. So I decided to risk it and tried two-and-a-half gallons each of cured bokashi and soil. It took about a month that first time, with summer heat, though unfortunately I don’t have an exact number for that one or the two that followed it. The photo above is what I tipped out of my Wriggly-spurred time-test bucket, begun one month ago today. It’s not quite mature yet, and some of the leafy bits introduced with the old soil are still identifiable, but the bokashi’d kitchen waste has all been converted into plant-pleasing compost, conveniently mixed with the soil already. Call it a month in warm weather, five or six weeks in cooler.

To Make Compost in a Bucket

1. Select your bucket.

Not, mind, a bokashi bucket! This method uses a large planter. Many of mine are five-gallon buckets with holes drilled in the bottom and sometimes lower sides, but any large planter should work, as would a smallish barrel or what-have-you.

This time, I didn’t add any drainage materials to the bottom; sometimes I do. Not sure if that affects the time (I’ll try to remember to test that someday). Drain holes are required!


2. Acquire a volume of soil equal to the amount of cured bokashi.

Cured here being defined as

a. at least seven days after the last addition of fresh waste, and
b. no longer producing more than a few drops of bokashi juice daily.

3. Put an inch of soil in the planter.

If you have mixed-quality soil, the worst of it goes here. Fill dirt is fine; a soilless potting mix is not.

4. Add bokashi and soil, mixed or layered an inch at a time, until within four inches of the top of the planter.

This is what will compost, so you’re looking for healthy soil microbes. If you have better-quality, fresh-from-the-garden soil, it goes here, not in the bottom. Compost breaks down faster the smaller the pieces, so smushing/chopping large pickled bits might not be a bad idea. Adding a bit of mature compost, unsterilized, should produce an even richer mix, and could substitute for most (if not quite all) of the dirt here though not in the outer layers, although I can’t yet confirm this from personal experience. (Another test!) It should also be possible to use less soil for this middle section and still produce compost, so long as soil microbes are adequately distributed, but again, no personal experience hereabouts for that. Equal parts, I can attest to.

5. Top with three inches of soil*.

6. Cover loosely, but do not seal, and

7. Set the bucket someplace out of doors, out of direct sunlight, and out of the way for at least one month (more in cooler climes). Near an existing, healthy garden would be ideal, but on a wood patio or shaded cement parking space works.

This produces an amount of compost-amended soil not quite equal in volume to the original ingredients, though the reduction isn’t dramatic. But though this is a great way to refresh tired soil, it’s not ideal for me, requiring as it does that I divert relatively large quantities of soil from my immediate gardening. So I’m still playing.

Back to the buckets!

DSF

*Two inches of soil and two of dried leaves would probably work, but I haven’t tested that yet. Two inches of leaves or soil alone does not create enough of an odor barrier to keep the raccoons and possums from sniffing it out.

[Edited Dec 01 to correct typo and clarify a phrase.]

Anyone for a nice glass of soapberry wine?

[Please pardon the not-quite-on-topic post: I only have the one blog, but I’ve posted several comments on other people’s sites about soapberries, and it seemed only fair to give them a chance to reciprocate. -G-]

My hiking partner saw them first, though I was looking: soapberries. The Western Soapberry, Sapindus drummondi, is a local relative of the increasingly written-about soapnut, and can be used the same way (though if your recipe calls for shell-halves instead of weights or volumes, you’ll have to do some adjusting). Fair’s fair—Tamryn helped me harvest, I gave her a bottle of soapberry liquid soap and some directions for storage and use.

A smallish bottle, since I only make the stuff in small batches. The dried fruit lasts pretty much forever; the liquid is more convenient to use, at least for me. But it’s perishable...

Tamyrn lives in a multi-generational household, and I suppose someone just decided that the liquid soap belonged with all the other cleansers, in a cabinet someplace, rather than in the fridge or by the washing machine where it would be used quickly. So it sat, forgotten, an unpasteurized fruit juice. And it did as fruit juices so often do.

The bottle’s back in my hands now, or rather, in my cabinet. “You play with it,” she said. “You didn’t tell me it could ferment!”

“I did say it might spoil.”

“It fizzed!”

Quite vigorously, too. Maybe more of a cider than a wine. Probably an even better insecticide now, but...is it still good for washing? Dunno yet, and there doesn’t seem to be much research about the topic out there (you can bet I looked!). Fermented soapberry liquid wouldn’t be nearly so perishable, and it would be very cool. And, while not the ideal holiday gift for most of my friends and family, I know at least a couple of people who might appreciate it. Rather more than gifts of berry-bits in bags. Always assuming it was usable for its intended purpose, that is.

There are references to people fermenting their soapnuts, whole, prior to use, but at periods of only a few days, and mostly apocrophyal at that. Some people’s washing-machine soapnuts begin to smell of vinegar, which doesn’t affect the washing, so maybe...


DSF

Bokashithon!

The Wriggly Wigglers ask folks to “don your white lab coat and the nerdy scientist’s specs” to help answer an interesting question: Just how quickly does bokashi break down?

Not sure about the spectacles, but I must have a lab coat somewhere... D’you think I should mention that I sometimes skip that two-week curing phase? Well, maybe I’ll cure a bucket just for them. -G-

DSF

It seemed like a good idea...

The great and beneficial Al Pasternak, who posted in the comment section (and through whom I found this post!), is too discreet to go posting company recommendations openly. So I’ve no idea what precisely he told blogger Betty about her in-bucket composting disaster, though I can guess at one line: “uh, no. That’s not EM.”

But I can see why she thought it might work.

Can you?