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!)

Tales from the Bucket: The Stone Soup Bucket

[image from the Florida invasive plants site]

I could work up a serious dislike of chinaberry trees. Actually, it wouldn't take too much work--the fruits are poisonous, the trees sprout like weeds from seed or sucker, and they're nearly as discouraging as walnuts when it comes to plant biodiversity in their immediate vicinity. Granted, their flowers smell nice, but that's not enough to earn their keep.

Before moving to Texas, I had never encountered the term “trash tree.” Until chinaberries and scrub elm, I'd never thought to use it. But chinaberries...well, I suppose they have their place, but there are far too many of them in my limited growing space.

Porch sweepings in this season are mainly those sticky chinaberry fruits with their hard centers, plus a few dried leaves, oak pollen, unripe mulberries, and assorted other detritus. It's not a great mix, and without serious hot-composting or some intervention, the result will have so many chinaberries-in-waiting as to be more trouble than it's worth.

Unless, of course, you're short on composts, funds, and resources altogether. Or are trying to be wholly self-sufficient in anticipation of TEOTWAWKI. Or have hungry grubs to feed...

Repulsive's active laying period has begun, but I don't have all that much to give him just now. He will not eat chinaberry fruits left to decompose where they fall, but put them in a container with a seasoning of bokashi and he'll chow down! And while the fruits are toxic to mammals, they don't seem to bug him one bit. So I swept the porch-fall into a series of flat, stackable containers--shallow dishpans--and added a cup of bokashi'd kitchen waste to each one. Bokashi plus sweepings will self-compost to some degree, though not significantly in this scenario, with so little moisture or pressure. But there is enough moisture for mama layers to consider the mix a decent foodsource, and it turns out the small volume of bokashi I used as a start, plus the occasional addition of a small bit of bokashi juice or anything else in the vinegar range*, is sufficient to keep the grubs happily chomping their way through those fruits and churning the leaves toward their natural end, with the help of EM and other IMOs.

There are already saplings appearing in this mix, so apparently chinaberries don't object to dilute acids and disturbance. But they're easy to uproot now, can be tossed right back in to provide more food for microbes and macros, and if they sprout and die now then the eventual soil amendment will not have tons of saplings. It will have a whole bunch of seeds, but after sprouting they're not nearly so pebble-hard as when they're still encased. Cooked stones are a bit softer, maybe? -G-

Being rather squeamish about Repulsive, I'm still planning on aging the grub mix and/or letting the worms have it, but it looks like it should be usable to a less grub-averse gardener in about two months from sweeping, finished enough to use as container fill for an outside planting without further intervention.

And if you weren't doing retail bokashi, this would still be perfectly feasible; a purely lacto fermentation will attract BSF layers. The current favorite among non-bokashi-ing BSFL “wranglers” seems to be fermented corn. Come to think of it, chinaberries in water might well ferment...

There is one major disadvantage to my stack-of-dishpans set-up--I do not believe Repulsive should be allowed to free-range--but now that I know the chinaberries can be useful, I'll build a case or something. The minor disadvantage, that the relatively open stacks require additional moisture, I consider a trade-off, as the relatively high rate of evaporation means I don't have to drain reservoirs of grub muck. Also, the neighbor's AC unit drips more than sufficient water onto my porch, and unless you're using clay or filters, AC water is not recommended for watering plants, so what else am I going to do with it?

Goes well with the whole something from perceived-nothing idea, too.

Are your grubs awake yet? What are you feeding them?





*vinegar, kombucha, bokashi bran mixed with water, even sauerkraut brine, if it's real kraut.

Greener Bokashi

...that's “green” as in eco-, not mold, folks!

As such things go, bokashi's already pretty green. At-home bucket fermentation followed by composting, trenching, or use as animal feed diverts organics from landfill and reclaims nutrients that might otherwise be lost. The process uses no electricity and very little people-power, creates no waste beyond a bit of carbon dioxide if properly managed, and requires only a minimal investment in resources.

Minimal here being a relative term, of course. EM bokashi bran is a retail product, which must be manufactured (sort of), packaged (in packaging that must be manufactured), shipped, stored, and purchased. EM-1 and EM-Plus liquid inoculants likewise, though they require less packaging, shipping, etc. Some retailers use reclaimed bottles, others offer compostable plastic packaging for the EM bokashi bran, and my latest mail-order purchase came with cornstarch packing peanuts, so they're working on lessening the total environmental cost.

But every bokashi bucket I have ever seen for sale is plastic.

Some of them have EM mixed in, and those I'd really like to try some day, but for the most part, bokashi buckets are plastic because that's what cheapest, and there's just not that much money to spare in bokashi yet. Even so, the retail bokashi buckets aren't what I'd call cheap, just less expensive than hand-made porcelain with EM in the material.

(Which would be incredible. Any potters out there willing to give it a try?)

Among my circle of acquaintance are none of the uber-dedicated no-plastics folks, but several us of are trying to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives. We're giving up Tupperware for canning jars; have more fabric shopping bags than shirts (almost -G-), are dipping our toes into mesh bags for produce and have learned how to label tare weights on our reusable bulk-ingredient containers.

Bringing more plastic into our homes doesn't feel right any more. Personally, I make an exception for gardening since plastic containers are cheap or free and I really couldn't afford to grow as much of my food as I do without them. And bokashi is an integral part of my gardening these days, so it gets the same pass. But not all my friends are yet converted to the joys of bokashi—

—does that sound as cult-leaderish to everyone else as it does to me? Yikes!—

Anyway, I can't possibly ask my plastic-aware friends to give plastic buckets pride of place in their increasingly plastic-free homes. It's one thing to ask the gardeners if they'd be willing to foster a plastic bucket wearing a pillowcase hood out behind their garage, entirely another to insist they keep a cat litter bucket on their kitchen counter. With or without an industrial-sized spigot at the bottom.

So I've been playing with ceramic kitchen canisters. The white ones in the photo came from a local thrift store, and the set of three cost me $6.48. No spigots, so this isn't ideal for someone who wants a regular supply of liquid plant food/drain maintainer. But if you're not into bokashi juice... The clear plastic one was my trial, $1.08 from the dollar store, purchased so that I could make an informed recommendation about absorbent materials. (More than went in this batch!) Canisters can be purchased to match pretty much any décor, and they're much more discreet than even the commercial bokashi buckets, much less my home-cobbled versions. The gaskets prevent odor escape and insect entry, and as long as you're able to open them once a week during the two-week curing stage, don't seem to present any risk of re-enacting the Great Canning Disaster of '06 ™ . These don't offer much total capacity, but should be more than sufficient for the particular household; larger crocks are correspondingly more expensive, but a quick online search turned up several with prices comparable to the retail bokashi kits.

I have once or twice seen ceramic kombucha jars/vinegar jars/wide-mouthed ceramic beverage dispensers with non-metal spigots, and if I could afford a custom piece, I'd order one of those with a non-metal grate an inch above the bottom, plus an airtight lid in place of the filter-ring and cork. Though, actually, cork would work if the fit were sufficiently tight, you'd just have to be a little more careful about keeping the mouth clean.

Longer post than I intended. Takeaway message: bokashi doesn't have to be fermented in plastic containers. Ceramics work just fine. Strong glass can be used, with caution—I've taken to using a bubbler for AEM, and don't see any reason you couldn't use one for the bokashi as well. Metal won't work in the long run, since the acid will cause it to rust, but can be used for a few fermentations if that's what you've got. (I used a coffee can for a fermentation unit once, and have used metal sieves for false floors continuously for months before they rusted away. Presumably, metal sealed against oxidation would work even longer.) If you want to add bokashi to your life, it can be done even if you're avoiding plastics.

Ask your friendly neighborhood Cult of the Microbes representative today!

DSF
...who's obviously been drinking the Kool Aid EM-X water...

Fail a bucket in ten easy steps

Now and then, I put together a starter kit for folks interested in trying bokashi; nothing elaborate, just a nested-bucket set with spigot, a bag of EM bokashi bran, a potato masher, and really simple instructions. (Usually one of my Tidy Cat bucket-sets, as I think the press-to-seal lids are a decent compromise between ease and security, but really, it's whatever I have on hand.)

I try not to ask after those buckets too often, but when my friend in the multi-generation-household offered to return their buckets to me, I had to know! Turns out one of the older members of the family found a new way to fail a bucket.

#11 Hide the thing! Immediately after adding a large quantity of fresh waste, including “heavy” items (meats, dairies, oils) but before the addition of any bokashi bran. And hide it so well that the reservoir cannot be tapped, so the less-than-optimal leachate backs up into the fermentation chamber.

In a word, blecch.

Suppose I ought to provide a few numbers to go with that one, yeah? Let's see...

#1. Skipping the drain.

Commercial bokashi buckets have a false floor, mesh sieve, or grate above a reservoir--but when folks decide to try DIY, too many decide not to bother with that bit. Yes, it is possible to ferment dryish kitchen waste without a reservoir, but it's not as simple as all that.

#2. Inadequate seal.

The microbes in EM bokashi, and in most of the homebrew/silo bucket models, are selected to work in the absence of fresh air. By contrast, the random microbes already present in and on food wastes do just fine in an oxygen-rich environment. Bokashi works on a dominance principle--the microbes we want need to out-grow the others, so we need to provide them the right conditions for that. Lids matter! As does the fit between your nested buckets, if you're using them, and the spigot. Not to mention, an improperly seated spigot will lead to bokashi juice escaping, a scenario to be avoided at all costs.

#3. Not enough bran.

I haven't heard of anyone completely forgetting bran in a bucket, but many neglect to add it at least daily, or with every inch* of food waste added, or the extra “scoop for luck” I think is advisable with heavy or strongly odorous items. My rule of thumb: if it smells bad, add more bran! And see #5 below.

#4. Forgetting to tap.

As with the reservoir issue above, this is one of those steps people don't always understand is required, or believe is as frequently necessary as it can be, until it's too late. As in, when their neighbors are complaining about the stench. Bokashi juice, or whatever you care to call bucket leachate, should never be allowed to back up into the fermentation chamber, and really ought to be drained twice a week or so regardless of volume (though, depending on your bucket contents, you might have almost none, or have one so rich with microbes it will keep fermenting until your bucket is ready for the next stage, with no ill effects from sitting. It's just...how do you tell, and do you want to risk it? Simpler to drain!)

#5. Unmashed bucket-stuffs.

I include a potato masher with my bokashi starter kits. It's not that they work any better than some other tool, but they're easy to acquire, cheap, and washable. Mashing serves three purposes: it excludes air, expresses excess moisture, and increases contact between the inoculant (bran or liquid) and the foodstuffs.

My local bokashi retailer, on the other hand, recommends stirring the top layer of food wastes to ensure appropriate contact between the microbial inoculant and foodstuffs, so I assume their kits include some sort of spoon. Not sure where they stand on moisture and pressure, but I do know there have been some issues with folks mashing their foodstuffs a bit too hard, and damaging the grates... Well, let's call this “unmixed” for them.

The next few ways to fail could, I suppose, all be lumped into one point: adding things you're not supposed to. But I thought they each deserved their own numbers. There aren't too many things you can't add to your bokashi bucket, but once you've gotten used to diverting all your kitchen waste to one spot, it can be hard to remember what doesn't go there! Generally, however, quick ways to fail your bucket will include:

#6. Adding synthetics/chemicals.

No synthetics ever belong in the bokashi bucket. No plastic**, no styrofoam, no silicone, no odd chemicals. And if you've used a paper towel to mop up the cleaning compound from your stove, that paper towel is now ineligible for the bokashi. (The usual retailer recommendation is to not put any paper in the bucket, but in small pieces it won't hurt, it just takes up space so your buckets fill up faster. Don't add it if that's a concern so long as you have some other landfill-diversion tactic for the stuff.)


#7. Drowning the bokashi: adding liquids

Our major microbial triad and all its fellows have a preferred habitat, and it's not in a bucket at 100% humidity! (Can't blame the things. -G-) Pour liquids down the drain or dilute and add to a compost pile, or dilute still further and use to water plants, depending on what those liquids might be, but as a rule, if it's pourable it's not for bokashi-ing.

Of course, if you have a stew or some split pea soup past edibility, those are close enough to solid that they're getting bucketed, no question. Add extra of whatever microbial inoculant you're using, mash or mix is up well, and tap the reservoir an extra time or two. But the leftover turkey broth? That gets fed to your drain if you have no better options.

#8. The opposing faction: molds/spoiled materials.

A really healthy bucket can overcome a small quantity of mold, but not much. If it's slimy or turning colors--any colors other than simple aging-past-edibility yellow or exposed-to-air brown--it's not for the bokashi bucket.

#9. Bugs!

If you're tossing that bag of fruit because it's got fruitflies, it does NOT go in your bokashi bucket. The things will spawn in there, and it's nasty. Uber-recyclers might freeze the material first, to kill the bugs, and then ferment it; I'm likely to toss it into the bamboo thicket for nature's clean-up crew, or into the apartment's outdoor compost bin, with several inches of dried leaves for topping.

#10. Abandoning the bucket.

Bokashi is relatively stable, but not eternally pickled. At some point, it does have to be extracted from the bucket, or items must be added to it, or it will rot. And you don't want to know what that's like. Really. Don't believe me? Ask Bentley.

And a bonus, unnumbered because it's not really under your control:

#X. Bad bran/inoculant.

These things happen. The EM-1 might have frozen during storage or shipping; the bran might have been contaminated; the bags, bottles, or boxes in which your preferred retail packages things might have picked up some microbes transferred from an inadequately cleaned container formerly used to transport garbage. Who knows?

EM bokashi bran should smell like one or more of its source materials and near relatives: Bran, molasses, yeast, vinegar. A hint of alcohol is possible, particularly in liquid inoculant, not ideal but okay. Any EM product should look like its source materials, too--liquid EM is brown, typically darker than cider vinegar but lighter than molasses; EM bokashi bran is visibly identifiable as bran or a mixture of bran and hulls or whatever, and either dry or damp-looking, in which latter case it may have some white acetobacter growth. If your bran is any other color, it should not be used! Blue, red, green, and black are not acceptable.

So, okay, the post-title's a bit misleading. I don't suppose you'd need to work your way through all ten-plus to fail a bucket--but I'd love to see--from a distance—the results if someone were to try!


For the rest of us, let's call this ten-plus things to avoid lest our buckets fail.

Happy bucketing,

DSF


[image from my files, sorry, no credit noted. If you know, please tell me!]

Is that anything like a Tupperware party?

Local bokashi-and-more company Microbial Earth is hosting a Bokashi Party this evening. I'm still working on the apartment, but decided I could take the time off to attend this--hey, what sort of bokashi blogger would miss it?

Just need to rememember that I'm a BROKE bokashi blogger, lest I end up carrying away two of everything they're trying to sell...

Edited to update:

Less Tupperware and more "round table"; though there were products available (I bought a bag of their latest bran, about which more later if I remember), the focus seemed to be on learning what customers and prospects most wanted to know. And based on that information, they've started offering small classes on various subjects. At which, presumably, there shall be products available. -G- Hey, guys--if you schedule one about worms and bokashi, I'll be there wallet in hand! You folks have those African ones, IIRC, and I don't. Yet.

Tales From the Bucket: Hands Off That Worm(ery)

(image from IMDB, came up in a search for "worm dude". Don't ask.)

The bucket wormery was harvested mid-November or thereabouts, at which point I refilled the bucket half and half with cured bokashi and porch sweepings (that's “dried leaves” to most folks, though sweeping off a deck picks up different stuff than raking a lawn). It occurred to me just after adding the bokashi that there were almost certainly still a few small or stubborn worms clinging to the sides and seams of the bucket—I'd overturned it to collect the vermicompost, but hadn't bothered to rinse it out or anything.

Oh, well. Seeing as I hadn't killed any worms in a while, I tossed another dozen into the mix and decided to call it a test. Small population, lots of food guaranteed to heat but a good mix for wormfood aside from that, no modifications.

None.

This bucket is the basic homebrew jr. wormery, nested kitty litter buckets with a spigot for drainage and holes in the upper rim and lid. But I have no tolerance for fruitflies, so my jr. got a cotton pillowcase snood fairly early on in its career, and I've never seen any reason to reclaim it. Once the bucket was full, I scrunched the pillowcase on, making sure it covered all the vent-holes, then shoved the whole thing underneath my outdoor seedling table. Where it remained. No insulation even during our hard freeze, no added water, no stirring, no dusting of eggshells, and no peeking.

Until spring. Around the time the BSFL were waking from hibernation, I decided to check on that bucket. Looked really pretty, lots of dark brown threaded with wriggling red, but I wasn't prepared to harvest that day, so I just tossed them some UCG and a few crushed eggshells to tide them over and went on my way.

Took another two months for me to get around to that harvest, so I'm glad I gave them that snack, but I think they might have been all right anyway. I pulled a respectable few cups of worms out during the harvest, along with eight beautiful liters of pure vermicompost all rich and dark and so very different from the less mature, soil-amended stuff I harvest more regularly (or at least more frequently) from the tower wormeries.

Not the most controlled experiment ever, but definitely worth doing again! For large planters, I prefer the soil-amended vermicompost, but for seedling mixes and soil-free applications having pure vermicompost is pretty much required. Also, it's a whole lot better suited to making compost tea*.

The planter towers are more immediately useful—I grow things in the tops—but there's something to be said for the no-tend model. No BSFL, no squash bug larvae, no fruitflies, no ants. Told myself that next time I'd be kinder to the worms, mix the leaves and bokashi in a worm-free unit to let it cook, but I didn't. Just as soon as I'd finished chortling over the total harvest, I tossed some leaves into the still-unrinsed bucket. And then some bokashi. And a dozen worms.

Hey, why mess with what works?

In a few generations, I might think about mixing some worms in from another colony. Other than that, I think this is part of the rotation. To a lot of vermicomposters, of course, this is heresy—planning to neglect the worms!—but I'm still working on the two-touch container garden (plant and harvest with no tending between). Always assuming I don't manage to cook this set before they produced some cocoons, I think this one's ready for cloning to my satellite locations.

Good thing my friends all know I'm obsessed. "Hi! How'd you like to foster a wormery? Junior's no trouble at all, just leave him tucked up in his blankie. I'll be back in a few months."


DSF

*or AIM, but that's a whole post on its own!

Tales from the Bucket: The Full Circle Bucket

Having figured out how to compost, vermicompost, and soil-finish bokashi appropriately for my setting, why am I still playing around with different techniques? Well, I’m curious, but more than that—this may not always be my setting! And there’s never a guarantee any living-space will conform to retailers expectations. So I’m trying to find methods that will work for other non-standard situations.

This particular bucket test is an unqualified success, but I wouldn’t use it unless my situation required it: by my current standards, it's slow. Three to six months depending on materials and conditions, much slower than my preferred techniques. On the positive side, it’s contained enough that it could be done in a garage as well as the balcony I’ve envisioned, or even indoors given some care with material selection.

What is it? A hybrid composting/finishing done in the bokashi bucket. I have, from time to time, a (temporary!) sufficiency of buckets, and in one of my more squeamish moments, decided to dump some dried leaves into a curing bucket instead of decanting the ferment. Turns out, that wasn’t such a bad idea, though not a complete technique—the bokashi fermentation can take over the leaves, which is great if you wanted acidified leaf matter but doesn’t turn the mixed garbage pickle into any sort of soil analogue.

Poking holes into the pickle-mass and tipping in a bit of finished vermicompost improves the chances of harvesting humus. So does mixing the leaves with the bokashi—in which case, you can probably save the vermicompost for something else. Putting a weight on top of that mixed leaf-and-bokashi makes success almost inevitable, and if you use soil as all or part of that weight, the end result is a familiar, no-explanations-needed bucket of potting medium. The reservoir does need to be emptied a few times early on in the process, after which the tap can remain open and the bucket ignored awhile. Stirring will speed time to completion, but so long as sufficient microbes were added, it’s not actually necessary.

Can’t speak to minimums here; my tests have used one part compost or living soil to four parts bokashi and four parts dried leaves/shredded paper.

What if you don’t have dried leaves? Use some other dry material and a microbe source. I’ve been using shredded phone book pages for the second-stage tests, since they degrade faster than newspaper (and besides, what else do you do with them?), and the same one-to-one ratio seems to work, though the end product is a little heavier. For microbes, use finished compost, vermicompost, or good garden soil.

And if you have unfinished vermicompost that still has worms in it, you can add that about a week after the leaves and bokashi get mixed together, which will greatly speed the time to completion, and get you a healthy new crop of worms as well, so long as the bucket’s kept out of direct sunlight and there’s some actual soil in there—preferably an inch-thick layer on top, above and beyond whatever may be in the vermicompost.

I can’t imagine many people having enough bokashi buckets to make this their primary post-ferment technique, but the closed-container process may be helpful for some settings. Like, say, folks who have no outdoor space!

Theoretically (which is to say, I haven't tried this), you could design your SIP in such fashion as to do the ferment, curing, finishing, and planting all in the same container, just by mixing in various items (EM bokashi bran, then leaves and perhaps soil, then a bunch of coir). All in the same bucket. Grow food crops, and after harvest...

Yeah, okay, you get it. Excuse me, I must have some gardening to do!

DSF

intervention cannot be far behind

My winter wormery*, about which I seem not to have written (bad blogger! no chocolate), proved to be a hospitable home for more than Verne. The immature insects may or may not live through the planned solarization**--I'm baiting away such of the wriggle as is willing to be moved, but the rest shall be sacrificed. Had considered, briefly, trying the usual soil-cover/weight/time salvage technique, but it turns out I need the container.

See, the insulated cooler's a good size and well suited for large-plant hydroponics, and I've just learned of a variation on the aquaponics model I simply have to try. Not quite as described, of course; fermenting food doesn't require rabbits around here. I have buckets for that!

My adventures in low-tech hydro don't get a lot of space on the 'slope, mostly because they're neither wholly failures nor great successes, and therefore don't make great reading. -G- Also, they don't use a great deal of bokashi, though I have been known to add a few drops of very diluted bokashi juice to a feed-mix. But hydroponics has a lot of benefits for the soil-poor gardener. Beginning with the fact that it doesn't take any soil.

I'm far too lazy to be forever brewing up and aerating seaweed and vermicompost teas for optimum nutrition; hence the appeal of aquaponics, where my goldfish fertilizes the water for me. But my aquarium bucket's only good for a few heads of lettuce or other "wet-footed" plants at a time. Can't drain off much of the water for additional plants, either, lest the fish succumb to terminal stress.

Vermicompost tea is one of the more common non-commercial feed-mixes, but I found only one authority willing to substitute fermentation for aeration in the process. (Which doesn't necessarily mean it isn't possible. Someone has to be first!) For the most part, homebrew recipes for hydroponic nutrient solutions are relatively labor-intensive, though it's generally assumed that labor will be mechanical.

But this model lets the worms do all the work. No tea-aeration necessary. For that matter, no brewing. I absolutely have to try it. Or maybe I just couldn't resist the name. Vermiponics, isn't it great?

Now if only I could figure out where I'm going to put this newest experiment. To grow plants, I need sunlight...

Feeling rootbound and overly shaded,

DSF

Note that this image is of a blackworm, Lumbriculus variegatus, not Verne. But, hey, how many swimming worm animations have you seen lately? It comes from the Charles Drewes' collection of educational materials.

*The Igloo was an insulated cooler donated by a neighbor. ("It has a spigot. I thought of you.") No airholes added, but container not filled, to allow an airpocket of sorts. Mesh frame to allow for drainage; standard worm bedding of moistened cardboard and newspaper, soil for grit, etc. Started with leaves and bokashi, pre-composted in the container before the worms were added. Fed infrequent large batches of compostables. Happy worms, finished vermicompost with some patches of pure 'cast, babies, and more insects than I've seen in a wormery since I gave up on the indoor model. Not something I'm doing again!


**Simple plan: carboard over pavement, far away from my plants. Very thin layer of insect-ridden bedding more or less free of worms. Clear plastic cover. Weights. More time than you'd think.

There’s a hole in my bucket wallet

Blew the garden budget again, though not by so much as you might suppose; aside from a pack of tomato seedlings I couldn’t resist, all this year’s new stuff has been or will be started from seed, much of it bought locally. Or produced and collected here on-site, like the shepherd’s purse, hyacinth vine, and amaranth. New purchases included a few different sorts of tomatoes—not that I expect them all to thrive, but so I can be sure of having any, and to try the different leaves—a couple of edible curiosities (eggplants shaped like miniature pumpkins? I couldn’t resist!), and a bunch of things the standard American grocery-shopper has never heard of, plus one or two sometimes considered weeds.

Sadly, I don’t think this is the year I’ll be growing enough produce to skip the greengrocers entirely (small spaces=smallish yields, though bokashi’s helping), so I’ve chosen as usual to focus on things I can’t get there or that I can’t afford to get there.

A few durable goods went into the virtual shopping cart, including a pressure sprayer to make bokashi juice application easier. Plus, I bought a few more bags of dirt—given the quality, I don’t think it merits the label soil—though not for immediate use. I am planning to refill the planter tower and let the feral worm colony play awhile, and to set up a test in temporary vermicomposting if I can talk a particular friend into loaning me the space. Also picked up, from the same retailer and brand as the dirt, some “humus” (those quotes denoting doubt) for a few different tests.

Can’t quite bring myself to admit the total here; more than I meant to spend, but less than the season cost of a single share in a CSA in this area. And unlike with the CSA, there’s no risk I’ll end up with a box full of things I don’t eat.

It could have been much worse. High-quality chem-free compost typically makes up a fair percentage of my total cost; so far this year, I’ve bought not so much as a single quart. Between bokashi and Verne (and George), there’s been no need—though that may change once the raised beds are in. Too, I usually end up buying eighty or so quarts of potting soil every spring, to replace the worst of the potted stuff and top off the permanent planters, and until this year have always bought the best I can afford, since I know how important it is. But thanks to last fall’s cheap-as-dirt test, that hasn’t been necessary either.

So wherefore the post-shopping-spree regret? Well, there were a lot of seeds. And though the local drought is officially over, that’s more likely a temporary condition than not, so I’m determined to fit out all my containers with some form of irrigation, preferably primary though I’ll take supplementary if that’s all I can get. Which in many cases equals additional cost, for clay pots to plant with the transplants, or hoses to connect to an external reservoir, or more nested-bucket sets and wicks and hollow pipes and things to make SIPs.

On the other side of the balance sheet, Verne has more than proved himself worth the one-time investment. I don’t think I’ll ever bother with an indoor wormery again, and neither are worms my choice for a primary landfill-diversion scenario, but outdoors, he’s doing his part to maintain soil health in the towers and planters, keeping me from having to replace soil as often (or at all? Too soon to say), and since he’s enthusiastic about his business, there’s no need for me to buy any vermicompost or vermicompost tea this season, either. Or, obviously, worms.

The bokashi’s worth the cost, too. Naturally –G–. Though EM-1 and molasses (and bran, for the standard recipe) are repeated costs, it’s cheaper to buy them than finished composts, fertilizers, and “instant” plant foods. Not to mention the non-monetary benefits.

One of these seasons, I’ll stick to my budget. Really. Maybe if I just start with a higher number…? Oh, that sounds like a bad idea!

DSF

[image from Botanical Interests, which is the right company, though mine were purchased from a local retailer]

Pardon me, can you spare some trash?

It's a temporary situation, but still extremely odd: I have a garbage shortage! Haven't been hauling my workplace organics home, as I'm just not that dedicated to the cause, so bokashi is from household stuff only. Add in a couple of meals out, plus a single-use press cup for those mornings when I'm running late (which would be all of them -G-) that means the grounds go with me, and the in-house organic's down to half a gallon or so per week. And then add in the fruit flies, I think from some too-cheap-to-pass-by citrus, and the situation becomes dire indeed.

The infested organics went into a salvage bucket--a planter, really, for the necessary bottom drainage, with a thick layer of soil, then lots of extra EM bokashi "bran" and the all-too-living bokashi, topped with three inches of soil and a weight, and stuck under the deck to rest for at least the next couple of months. Probably longer than necessary to get rid of the short-lived flying pests, but I'd rather not take chances.

Half a gallon of bokashi isn't enough to feed the en-towered iterations of Verne, let alone begin to replace the amendments I've been using in the spring gardening, and there are new garden spaces this year, so I'll need more still. Barring raiding the neighbors bins (eww!), whatever am I to do?

1) Change the menu for Verne's next meal. UCG and dried leaves, spritzed with AEM, should keep the wriggle happy--and it doesn't have to be at my standard 1:1 ratio, either. The reason I've been feeding bokashi to worms is to convert the fermented "waste" to something more useful given my particular needs, but that's not the only way to acquire that useful substance!

2) Substitute weeds for kitchen waste. Yes, that's what I did with the failed 100 degree bucket, but with temperatures not yet in the 70s, failure is unlikely. If I want a bucket of wettish fermented vegetable matter, cleavers past their use-by date and random thistles should do for a base.

3) Use the cured bokashi as a compost accelerator. That is, mix a larger volume of dried leaves and fresh garden waste, or some other combination of greens and browns, in the approved giant pile or bin, and stir in my few scant cups of ferment to kick-start the heating reaction. It's a little soon in the year to try the black plastic planter routine, but I do have all the supplies, and again, the 1:1 ratio I use for bokashi and dried leaves is a convenient guide, not a rule--if the goal is compost, perhaps 10:10:1 green/brown/fermented might do as well. Or 8:15:1, even.

4) Hit the coffeeshops. UCG is a lovely "green," despite its undeniably brown color, and is as well the only non-carbon source I've yet found to use as a carrier for microbes. Too, coffeeshops are used to gardeners asking for their UCG, so it's a little less odd than asking the neighborhood cafe if they wouldn't mind setting aside their food waste for me. Though, really, if this goes on...


DSF

[empty yellow bucket image from Doc's Frugal World, since the link seems to have vanished from the earlier post.]

Tales from the Bucket Bag: This Bag Will Self-Destruct In...

So, that’d be a No on the compostable plastics for by-the-bag bokashi finishing. Or at least, a Not Suited for my particular situation. Other people may have different needs, so here’s the brief:

The compostable bags most accessible around here (all the same brand pictured above) do not respond well to getting wet--so you can’t store them where they may get rained on, and even dew is a concern. Integrity retained less than three weeks if exposed to weather, regardless of contents. For me, that’s not really long enough. And of course, if the bokashi comes into contact with the bag...well, even the retailers say they’re not recommended for use with high-nitrogen, high-moisture compostables:

We strongly recommend that wet grass clippings be left on the lawn, where the clippings will quickly biodegrade and add nutrient value to your lawn. Placing wet grass clippings in either a paper bag or a BioBag can stimulate bag decomposition within three or four days.

I’m not so sure about the fragility of heavy paper leaf and lawn bags, but these writers are if anything being conservative with their estimates when it comes to their own product. In some case, the bags just melt away into nothing; rather cool, but not of any particular use.

But if the goal isn’t to have a discrete (and discreet) bokashi-and-leaf unit, these can be incorporated into other landfill-alternative scenarios. Bentley’s had nice results feeding filled bags to his worms, and while BSFL don’t seem inclined to chew through plastic no matter its source-material, once it breaks down enough to allow access, grubs will quickly dispose of the whole thing.

DSF

Rigged to Succeed

Last fall, I bought the cheapest potting soil available to see how much of an improvement bokashi could make. Some of that soil, layered with bokashi, was put to as immediate a use as feasible; a few gallons of it I set aside to rest until spring.

The placement of those resting planters may have presented an unfair advantage. Though I wasn’t intending to cheat! It’s just that I have so little space (especially since I started measuring my life by the bucket -G-), and the matched set of five filled one-gallon planters seemed so very suited to stacking, so I stacked the things. And where else would a stack of planters go but next to the worm towers?

The first of my seed orders arrived last week, and there was a break in the weather today—must be time for sowing! Or at least mixing a seedling soil. Wandered out to bucketville intent upon collecting a bit of vermicompost (not pure vermicast, as that’s too strong for seedlings), maybe a bit of composted bokashi, and some potting soil. Figured I might add some Spanish moss for airflow, sand for certain crops, all the usual, but first the basic dirt-and-nutrients.

Verne, Sexton, and the third planter tower I keep pretending is only temporary and have thus not named were all overdue for feeding and ready for a harvest, so I collected some finished vermicompost (and such vermicast as had precipitated down into the reservoir layer). Reaching for planters gets to be kind of automatic by the time you’ve deconstructed three towers, so I’m not sure the difference in design really registered, though I did note the absence of a plant at the tower-top. A clay saucer?

Oh, right, I thought, this is the spring soil test. Well, it’s not really spring, but last-frost’s not too far off, let’s see what we’ve got. So I tipped the saucer off and hauled the top planter down to take a look. What I saw was yet more red wigglers living up to their name. Not, mind, so many as in the established worm towers, but probably enough to start a new wormery with. And I saw the same in every planter in the stack. Without the trivets and internal bracing I installed in the tower wormeries, too—apparently, composting worms are far less sensitive to pressure than I’d assumed. The soil was fairly wet, but responded easily to gentle forking, the ideal cake-crumb texture so often cited and so rarely seen, at least by me. Some volume reduction had occurred, as the bokashi broke down and the worms ate and the storm-waters flushed loose bits away, but I figure I’ve got about four gallons of incredible soil ready for the planting.

Can’t say just now how it compares to high-quality retail soil, as I haven’t got any of that. I did plan to buy some, but...why? My last batch of in-house mix from the Natural Gardener didn’t look as healthy as this! Feels like I’d just be throwing money away.

Not buying any worms this year, either. But I might be forced to invest in a few more seeds...

It never ends, does it?

Happy spring is about to spring,

DSF

Bucket Vision

I have become one of them. The vermimad. The composting compulsives. Those folks who whimper when they see **perfectly good organics** being tossed away. Not just the old "people are starving, don't throw away that food" mindset, but its logical (oh so extreme) extreme: viewing all not-in-current-use organics as potential nutrients for future foods. Or maybe just food for the soil.

Which would be bad enough, but it gets worse. Like the apocryphal man with a hammer, to whom every problem is a nail, I had a tunnel-vision reaction to a problem for which there really isn't One Perfect Solution For All.

Shame on me!

See, I was asked last week if it'd be possible to feed bokashi to BSFL. And I could not for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to. Waste all that lovely ferment? Guess it's better it be fed to grubs than be landfilled, but... Yep, a fanatic. Bucket-mad, that's me.

There is at least one perfectly reasonable situation wherein one might elect to feed bokashi to BSFL: where bokashi is used to divert organics from the trash-stream without increasing the frequency of trash pick-ups (whether by the municipality or some alternate entity), and no appropriate composting facility has been established to receive that ferment. BSFL don't require a whole lot of infrastructure nor space.

They might also be a way around some restrictive regulations, depending on the area--as feeding larvae could legitimately be seen as raising bait or animal feed rather than running a composting or waste disposal facility.

And bokashi + grubs could answer the Green Seal for restaurant question in urban areas, too! The requirement there is that suitable organics be sent to "a farm," but as distance between city and farmland increases, that becomes less practical--food can rot prior to or during transport, becoming unviable even as animal feed. Mixed-material bokashi is not, so far as I know, considered an acceptable animal feed. But BSFL are. Use bokashi to stabilize the food waste until pickup, then feed it to the larvae at a nearby urban location, and transport only the mature grubs to feed the farm animals.

So, once I got my sight out of the bucket, it didn't take too much for me to admit there are some situations, some times, where it might make sense to feed bokashi to BSFL. But, man, it bothers me. Somewhere in the back of my head, there's this mourning keen for all that fermented matter just waiting to be mixed with dried leaves. Or layered with landfill to rehabilitate the dirt into soil. Or spread out on the grass on the site of a future lasagna garden, topped with newspaper and a tarp and weighted down*.. Or...

Excuse me, I need to go found a twelve-bucket program. Step one: admitting there is a problem.

DSF

*Haven't done this yet, people being unreasonably fond of their lawns and unwilling to let me kill them even in a good cause. Sigh. Some day!

Poor dirt, rich harvest

I like the idea of subsurface fertilizers; it seems right to me, putting the plant food where the roots can grow down into it. That’s the appeal of planter-finished bokashi: after the bucket, layer the fermented matter into soil, et voila! Though this is not always the right solution for me--it requires being organized enough to gather relatively large volumes of soil, cured bokashi, and empty planters together for assembly; there’s that two-week resting period before planting; and it doesn’t use enough bokashi for my needs, not without many more planters than I have room to keep. Only one third of a planter’s volume can be bokashi with this method. And what does one do about the permanent planters, where soil and roots have been placed long since? So I compost much of my bokashi, or finish it in some other fashion. Still, where I can planter-finish it, I do, as that’s some impressively nutritious ready-to-sow soil once it’s ready! Even where the soil wasn’t much to speak of starting out.

Over the years I’ve been container gardening, I’ve bought soil of every quality from appalling to magnificent, but even the best eventually grows tired, separated from the soil web that would refresh it in its place of origin. Compost helps, of course, and vermicompost even more, but those natural amendments are not exactly cheap if one has to purchase them over and over (and over!) again.

I have no need to buy compost these days. And with Verne and Co. cheerfully digesting plantersful of precomposted leafy bokashi mix, I no longer have to carefully ration vermicompost so as to have enough for every plant in my garden. I don’t even necessarily have to apply the stuff, as free-range wriggles will find their way into outdoor planters where bokashi has been added and do their thing on-site. After a year of this, the garden is demonstrably healthier than before, with strong new growth and incredible yields. While it is still possible to tell the the very worst of my previous (clay) pot-soils, most of my planters now contain rich mixes comparable to the very best organic retail products I can afford, all dark and springy and largely differentiated by amendment for particular growing needs. It’s hard to believe how much of this stuff was barely able to support plant life a bare year ago, or to remember what a victory I considered a few paltry heads of lettuce in the days before bokashi...

So the other day, I hit a local store for the cheapest available bagged potting soil--$2.50 for 40 quarts--for another in my ongoing series of experiments. This is visibly poor soil, lots of sharp sand in a suspiciously dark and lumpy base (either non-local or amended with treated municipal sludge, or perhaps both). I’ll be planter-finishing this soil with bokashi in both indoor and outdoor settings, and growing leafy vegetables or herbs in it; suppose I’ll try a few lettuce seeds or something in the unamended soil by way of confirmation that this stuff is as poor as it seems, but otherwise, the comparison will be between this soil layered with bokashi and the potting mixes I already have, which have all been heavily inoculated with microbes and nearly saturated with plant-accessible nutrients by this point.

I expect the more amended soil to perform better, but honestly not by too much; microbes live quickly, after all, and the major difference I’ve seen in short-term performance between bokashi-only or vermicompost is in germination (long term observations are ongoing). There is a better than even chance that the produce will be slightly less healthful than that grown in my organically sourced soils, but I’m in a transitional sort of mood today, so am choosing not to worry about it much. It should still be far better than anything bought from a conventional grocery store, that’s been losing nutrients during shipping and display...and cheaper, too! Both in terms of resources used per calorie/serving, and to my budget; the planters (buckets) were all free, bokashi costs me at most $0.50 a bucket (one dollar a week figure for standard EM bokashi bran recipe and accessories), and one bag of this cheap potting soil should be enough for two and a half to three large planters. So call it $1.00 per planter, each planter about equivalent to one “square foot” garden sub-plot, usable for many, many years as bokashi and compost will serve to renew the organic materials plants remove from the soil. Leaving me only the cost of seeds or transplants, if I don’t propagate my own from gathered or gifted sources.

My elderly relatives used to talk about “poor dirt farmers,” but somehow, I don’t think this is what they meant. Then again.

DSF

Frugal Bokashi

When I did the numbers before starting this project, I figured an initial $30 investment should cover my first six months of bokashi, $5 a month to see if bucket fermentation was suited to my particular needs. No retail-priced bokashi bucket in that budget (though I am curious about the EM-impregnated plastic ones), not even packaged dry EM bokashi bran, just a bottle of EM-1, molasses, and bran, plus some scrounged buckets. The cheapest entry-point I could see. Why six months? Because I’d read that the bottled culture would lose efficiency after that point, so I’d have to restock. Or not, if it turned out bokashi wasn’t for me.

It’s approaching the one-year mark, and I decided to revisit those numbers. How much did a year of bare-bones branded EM bokashi cost me?

A dollar a week.

Actually, a bit less. $50 for the first year, counting a few durable items. I decided that spigots are absolutely necessary for me—I’m lazy, and far less inclined to remove the inner bucket from the reservoir than I am to just turn the tap—and bought as well a couple of potato mashers and a pail opener to complete my basic bokashi kit. That last item isn’t necessary with my favorite repurposed kitty litter containers or the two-gallon plastic barrel with the screw-on lid, but for the food buckets, it’s a convenience well worth the $4 it cost.

In all, I spent less than $40 on the actual inoculant/carrier/food. And next year, that number may go down further still. A smaller bottle of EM-1 would only be cheaper if I could find one locally, as shipping liquids is seldom really cheap (to date, I’ve only found one place in town where I can buy any EM, Whole Foods). But “activating” EM stretches a bottle in terms of both quantity and longevity such that one bottle a year is reasonable, and I don’t really need a whole liter just for me. Nor would I if I were mixing bran for half a dozen households every month! As I’ve had some success with non-bran carriers, I’ll keep playing with those, so I may well buy less wheat bran, but if/when I do decide to buy any, I’m placing a small-scale bulk order for that and for the molasses as well.

The required repeated expense is a common objection when bokashi comes up in discussion. And home-cultured IMO is a valid alternative--there are tons of recipes out there, and while my own experience has so far been mixed, lots of folks swear by their non-branded silo bucket inoculants. But that annual @ $40 expense is actually saving me money. Forget about trash fees, it’s the commercial compost I no longer have to buy! But there is also the lesser expense on trash bags (volume and frequency), less use of chlorine bleach (cleaning, washing towels and dish cloths, deodorizing the trash bins) and non-chlorine bleach (laundry).

And my happier plants are producing more even in the drought and heat...

DSF

They can’t go south for winter—they’re already here!

Or, the Riddle of the Moving Wriggle

I harvested the last of my spring potatoes earlier this month. The "grow bags" were too degraded for further use and went into the compost(s), but the one hard-sided potato planter (okay, kitty litter bucket) contained really nice soil still, once I got down past the stem-cover layer. Impressively good soil, actually; rich and dark and springy/spongy, exactly the way soil is supposed to be but container-mix at the end of a growing season never is. Checked my records and confirmed that I'd planter-finished EM bokashi for that unit.

This was my first root-crop harvest from planter-finished bokashi; I’d been a little concerned that remaining undecomposed bits might cause problems, but for whatever reason, that was not the case here. No corn-cobs came up with the russets, no dessicated citrus warped the tubers in the growing. The only things that came out of that planter were yummy potatoes, pulled weeks late without harm. Potatoes produced through a standard top-layering practice using mainly dried leaves with only the bokashi-amended soil for nourishment.

Definitely something I'll do again. But I try not to plant the same thing in the same soil twice in a row. And besides, it's not potato-planting season...

As I had no immediate need for that planter once the potatoes were out, I tossed the leafy stem-cover back in by way of mulch and decided to let it rest awhile. Sunday, I found a matching bucket, so set about creating a sub-irrigation nested set. Step one of my planter conversion required having both buckets empty.

Imagine my surprise upon upending that bucket: An inch or so of dry mulch, then lovely soil full of worms!

I don't really expect Verne and Company to go wandering. They should stay in their towers where I put them. But I didn't put any earthworms in any containers at all, so those grey ones, at least, immigrated from elsewhere. I suppose the red ones might have as well; in this area, I'm hardly the first person to have tried keeping them, and there's more than enough leafy matter around to house a few strays. Still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that worms can get up onto the porch, but it’s happened before.

Wherever they came from, the volunteer planter-worms did a lovely job turning the leafy matter (and any remaining bokashi) into beautiful rich planting medium, and I took full advantage. The worms themselves, no matter their color, I placed into a spare tower layer for now. Except for the ones I doubtless missed during my harvesting.

I want more. More incredible soil improved and mixed in place. More happy, healthy plants. More worms moving into planters! I’ll be watching the plants potted up with this batch quite hopefully...

Spontaneous in-planter vermicast is a lovely gift; planned in-planter creation would be better still. The vermilit says worms won’t last long in a container once the food’s gone, which makes sense; conventional container gardening says not to include uncomposted material, as the decomposition process can sequester or even remove plant-required nutrients and alter soil pH. But if you could find the right balance of food to worm to plants, could you, maybe, have self-refreshing soil? Soil that would actually improve throughout a season, that would feed plants all the time without risk of salt build-up or burning?

Hey, it’s worth a try. If I get it wrong, the worms will just emigrate. Apparently, they’re much more mobile than I think!

Welcome to Verne-ville, population one billion

The retail planter wormery pictured is about thirty inches high. Sexton's approaching that now, and while he is smaller--twelve inches in diameter as opposed to the Garden Planter's fifteen--it's not so much smaller as I'd thought, which leads me to wonder...Sexton's one of two outdoor tower wormeries, and I'm half-seriously considering adding a third. Just for me. Do I really generate that much more waste than other vermicomposters?

My planter-tower wormeries do get fed bunches of dried leaves, but it's not only that; I'm feeding about a third of my bokashi to the worms, so with no leaves at all (if that were feasible) I'd still be short on tower-space. Not the leaves alone. What else, then?

I think it's the increase in foodstuffs eligible for vermicomposting with bokashi. The meats, aromatics, oils, and grains that are either not appropriate or appropriate only in small measure in their raw state are all apparently quite acceptable to wrigglers once fermented. Whereas, back when I was feeding Verne only the recommended vegetarian chopped-frozen-and-thawed stuff, it seemed like he got a bit less than half my kitchen waste. Which would fit rather more easily.

What can I say? I like citrus! And every member of the allium family I've ever met. -G-

As for the leaves, no doubt the retailers assume that someone with the space for a "garden" wormery also has the space for a traditional compost pile, so dried leaves and other non-food compostables won't end up taking space in the wormery. But that's not always the case, and it's hard enough asking people to house and feed a collection of worms without insisting they keep a compost pile as well.

[Says the person with compost bin, three different wormery designs, bokashi buckets, and a bucket full of black soldier fly larvae. Ah, well.]

Two pounds of worms, they say, can handle up to seven pounds of waste per week. Which is apparently what the "average" family of four is expected to generated, if the Family Size Wormery is any guide. That's comparable to the Jr. Wormery figures I saw some while back, that said half a pound of worms per person's kitchen waste per week.

I generate a gallon of bokashi in an average week. Plus the odd contribution from the coffeehouse, an occasional bucket from a long-suffering friend, etc. How much does a gallon of bokashi weigh? Depends on what's being fermented! But judging by the cocoons(!) and small wrigglers I saw last time I fed Trey, it's more than his current population can eat.

The worm-boom goes on.

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?

talking trash

I am neither No Impact Man nor Fake Plastic Fish. Garbageland, while interesting, is in no shape or form the experiment for me. And part of the reason I'm not too active on BlogHer is that I feel like I'm sailing under false colors in their Green and Eco-Conscious category--eco-conscious, me? I'm just a gardener here.

Well, maybe.

If you ask, I'll describe myself as "casually green." Aware of the problem and willing to go a few steps out of my way to help mitigate it, so long as those steps aren't too arduous or difficult to remember. Habitually green, in many ways, but not in every one. The journey away from plastic is incredible to read about, a great conversation-starter, and far too difficult for me to even consider embarking upon myself. And so on through the larger changes of lifestyle.

Reducing the amount of trash I throw away was never really the goal when I started bokashi. Not exactly. I wanted to stop throwing away things I could turn into compost. The small benefit to the overloaded trashstream made a nice secondary excuse for carving out some funds from my always-straitened budget to start bokashi-ing, but the primary reason was to make compost, cheaply, instead of buying it expensively.

That's all.

This week, I threw away a grand total of one gallon of trash (not counting the kitty litter). The recycling bin got its fair share, though I didn't measure that. But all that went into the trash bin was a single re-purposed one-gallon bag, filled mainly with the plastic wrappings of grocery-store purchases.

In that same week, I put one and a quarter gallons of soi-disant "waste" into the bokashi bucket.

This, mind, not counting the UCG I took home from the office, nor the scrapings from the cat-food dish that got fed to Repulsive. All by myself, in one week, I generated more than a gallon of fermentable could-be-trash-or-could-be-useful kitchen stuffs: UCG, tea leaves, cantaloupe rind and banana peels and corn-silk and -husk and -cob, the insect-nibbled outer leaves of garden produce, onion-skins and burdock peel...

It's possible that I'm eating more fresh produce because of the bokashi--both because the garden's doing well enough that there's simply more fresh produce within feet of my front door than ever before, and because I'm more inclined to buy whole fruits and vegetables at the market now. These days, I balance the "there's only one of me" calculation that would have led to my buying, say, a package of melon cubes instead of a whole melon with the realization that the leftovers will keep in the fridge a day or two, and Verne might like the rind when I'm through.

And I'm quite sure I recycle more because of the bokashi bucket. In the old days, I might toss an empty cat food can in the trash rather than wash it out for recycling, my issues with the household feline's chosen treat being what they are. Why not, if I was going to have to take the trash out that day anyway? And some bottles are really hard to wash out, and since there's a can going in anyway... But these days, I take the trash out once a week because the bins have to go down to street-level anyway, rather than out of urgent need. (Always excepting the kitty litter.)

It feels fairly revolutionary to me, the idea that trash doesn't have to smell bad nor be taken out every day or two, but landfills were never meant to receive so much organic matter; the wholescale trashing of compostables is a new--and regrettable--practice. My great-grandparents would have fed their kitchen leavings to chickens or goats or pigs, depending, as would their parents and grands back through the years; my grandmother had a vegetarian compost pile for years, until moving to one of those horrible planned communities whose planners didn't plan for them. My mother throws things away, as do all her peers.

Me, I'm not inclined toward livestock, even if I had the space. But I seem to have largely traded in my trash can for a bucket or two. And I have to say, I am more than happy with the exchange! The trashstream is less taxed by my contributions, which is lovely; and my garden is thriving, which I have to admit I find far more satisfying. Still, it is nice to know I'm putting less of a burden on the earth in some small way. You couldn't call it accidentally green, as I knew the benefit was there at least in potential, more serendipitously green, in that I wasn't looking for it, but am happy to have found it anyway.

Bokashi allows me to compost more than I'd ever thought possible, including meats, oils, and dairy. All the organic kitchen waste. Leaving nothing to spoil in the trash, to stink and attract insects and generate methane and all those horrid things.

(Still excepting the cat litter, as I've yet to find a compostable sort the HF will use.)

Kermit was wrong: sometimes it is easy.

Being...well, you know. -G-

DSF