Tales from the Bucket: Dark-Roast EM

I’ve been playing with used coffee grounds (UCG) in place of bran. Not the stuff I generate--I do drink a fair amount of coffee, but not that much, I don’t think--but coffeehouses hand the stuff out if you ask, and I frequent any number of the joints.

The last batch of caffeinated EM bokashi bran I made was, by my standards, very large: 40 cups of UCG, plus AEM and molasses and a pint or so of water. As UCG is damp-to-wet upon receipt, you need less water than in the basic recipe; other than that, and fishing out any filters (or teabags, depending on the coffeehouse), no changes need be made to the fermentation. This does require very fresh UCG, however; undesirable microbes will spoil the grounds in short order.

Takes about the same length of time to ferment UCG as wheat bran, completion judged by presence of mycelia, scent, and pH. It's tempting to dry some for use as a mulch--it looks right!--but that test shall wait until early spring, when heating the soil layer might not be altogether a bad thing. As with any EM source, it encourages hot-composting reactions when added to high-carbon (brown) materials. In contact with the scattered leaves atop my soil, and bits of same mixed in, I imagine it might burn roots in more than one sense, and my plants are already hot enough, thanks.

In a bucket, the EM+UCG encourages fermentation. Just like the bran-based stuff. I’m generous with my microbes, but no more generous with coffee-based than otherwise, and it works just as well in most situations, better in some (though not, I imagine, in a litter box or cage!).

As for the smell, any undried EM bokashi bran has a characteristic aroma. The coffee’s is stronger than the wheat bran’s, but my bokashi buckets have fair quantities of coffee grounds in them regardless, so there’s no real difference after the initial bucket-seeding. And if the smell of used coffee grounds were going to bother me, it likely would have long before now.

The only place I run into problems with UCG-based EM bokashi bran is while drying--solar drying seems so practical here in Austin, but Repulsive’s adult offspring are drawn to the scent of EM anyway, and they adore UCG, and have been known to penetrate my solar dryer to reach the stuff. Yecch! Some folks use their cars as enclosed solar dryers, but I have the same problem with that as I do with oven drying: I’m averse to filling my kitchen with odd odors, so oven-drying sweet-pickled coffee’s just not happening.

Oven-drying wheat-bran-based EM bokashi bran I’ve done, and it smells more like bran muffins than otherwise, so I can handle that. (Fairly strong undertone of kombucha during the first minutes, but not intolerable when the weather allows for open windows.) For the most part, I make my EM bokashi bran in small enough batches to use fresh, which is one less step and takes far less space, but that may not be practical for all people in all situations. In this case, I walked into a Starbucks and, on seeing their Grounds for the Garden basket empty, asked if they had any UCG. They gave me more than a bucket’s worth, double-bagged and so heavy I wished it had wheels. So I figured I might as well make a large batch. For one particular use, it wouldn’t matter if Repulsive got into it while drying--

But that’s another post, I think.

UCG as a carrier may not be the single greenest or most frugal choice, depending on your situation (transportation miles, unknown source of mixed beans, the temptation to wallet and waistline engendered by entering a coffeeshop in the first place...) But while wheat bran is cheap, free is often better, and UCG is a waste item anyway, having already served its purpose. So I thought it was worth trying.

Anyone know if songbirds are sensitive to caffeine? I know they can get drunk, at which point they fly into windows and lampposts and things. Do I have to make decaf coffee bran?

DSF

-G-

How much time does it take to do bokashi?

When people ask me how long it takes to bokashi, I tend to assume they mean the time from kitchen waste to compost, but that’s a gardener’s query; the non-gardening green citizen might well be more interested in how much time it takes per day. How much time it takes to ferment instead of tossing the kitchen waste.

In my case, these days, practically none. Some number that, while larger than zero, is more properly reported in seconds-per-day than hours.

Really.

To begin with, I don’t chop up my kitchen trash (unless I’m feeding it to Verne). The bokashi bucket gets whatever bits and ends I happen to have, and if that’s eight-inch long pieces of pineapple rind, so be it. While I probably would chop up large pieces of meat, the situation hasn’t come up.

Then there’s the fact that I keep my bokashi bucket next to the trash and recycling containers in my kitchen; there’s no difference in time or effort to toss something into one versus another. Given a sufficiently healthy ferment, the odd tea bag or fruit rind needn’t be followed by another dose of EM; if I’ve only got a small bit of whatever, I just toss it into the bin.

When I add large volumes of organic matter, or any meat or dairy, I add a scoop of EM bokashi bran and use the masher--call it a minute total, once a day or every other day depending on how much cooking I’m doing, plus one utensil to wash*. And twice a week at least, I drain the active bucket, which might take as much as another minute and results in a cup to clean only when I don’t drain directly into the sink. Call it ten minutes a week for the active bucket. About as much time as I’d spend hauling multiple trash bags out of the apartment to the outdoor trash bins, back when I had multiple trash bags in a given week.


The curing buckets get drained when I think about it, but ought to be tapped at least twice a week. In the retailers’ usual model, there are two buckets, one curing while the other fills; in that scenario, a bucket must be emptied and cleaned twice a month. And how long that takes depends on what you’re doing with your cured bokashi.

The quickest option is to toss it into your compost bin. How long does it take to upend a bucket and scrape down the sides? Probably less than it would to locate a stopwatch, so let’s just go with “minimal.” Of course, that assumes you have a compost bin, and that it contains dry matter sufficient to balance the contents of the bucket.

If you choose to use cured bokashi as a slow-release fertilizer without first composting it, then you’ll have to layer it into planters at least two weeks before plants can be added--but as for how long it takes, that’s completely dependent upon how speedy a pot-prep you do. If you trench compost, add digging a trench into your calculations.

I still haven’t found a wholly satisfactory soil-less method of composting small batches of bokashi, though the tests are ongoing. My usual procedure (for now) is to transfer cured bokashi into one or two large planters first prepped with an inch of poor soil. After every two inches of bokashi, I add a handful of good garden soil or mature compost, something with a wealth of beneficial soil-borne microbes, and I top the planter with three inches of soil or two each of soil and dried leaves. Then the whole thing gets set out of the way for a month, ideally in contact with soil Time? Call it fifteen minutes per bucket, plus a bit of soaking time for the empty one before I start the whole thing again.

Making EM bokashi bran takes some time (I figure about an hour’s active time all told, including remembering to add the necessary supplies to the shopping list –G-), but you can always go the retail route for that--and if you choose a company that offers free shipping, the price isn’t too bad; the five-pound bag at Bokashi Center will set you back $15, which comes out to five to seven dollars a bucket, depending on how generous you are with the scoop. And no more time than it takes to authorize a PayPal charge.

Making the buckets, again, takes me some time, but there are retailers practically frothing at the mouth to help you there.

So how long does it take, per day, to do bokashi? As with any new practice, there’s a learning curve, but once you’ve adjusted to separating food remains from landfill-destined trash, it takes no time at all.

It’s just another bin. Or bucket, whatever. And the procedure’s all too familiar for urbanites these days: lift the lid, add your waste, shove down, close lid, and walk away. It’s just the end result that’s so much more welcome this way!

--DSF

*I sometimes set up a small lidded container for tag ends on days when I’m playing in the kitchen. This keeps me from opening the bucket a dozen times in a day, which would slow the ferment. It does, however, result in another dish to clean. How many seconds does it take to wash one extra dish?

I can haz bukket?

Okay, so I'm slow. It took me a while to realize that I'd gone from taking small bags of trash out every day or couple of days to taking tiny, mostly-empty bags of trash out every day or couple of days. And even longer to actually think about it, to wonder why I was still having to take out the trash every other day when I was pickling all my food waste.

Surely there wasn't anything left in there to smell bad?

But there was: cat food. The household feline prefers disgustingly gloppy commercial wet food, set out a spoonful at a time a couple of times a day by way of reassurance or treat or whatever. Usually, she eats it all, but now and then a bit escapes her, and in Texas, it goes bad quite quickly.

I'm not all that comfortable feeding the stuff to her anyway, though it's what she likes, and apparently my mind just couldn't stretch to encompass the thought of adding any remaining scraps and scrapings to my buckets. To my compost. To my garden. To me.

Maybe that's overly squeamish, but there it is. So the cat food is getting its very own micro-bucket, its contents destined for some non-gardening application, or at least not food gardening. On its own, gloppy wet food does not produce bokashi juice, though it does ferment; I think a compostable inner bucket should be a possibility. So that's the next test. Using a newspaper seedling pot, I think.

The buckets, they breed!

DSF

[image from http://icanhascheezburger.com/category/bukkit/page/2/]

Off-the-grid bokashi?

Just found a new site dedicated to non-retail bokashi solutions. Homebrew bokashi starters.

I’ve been meaning to do a few non-commercial test-versions myself, though it’s not so high on the list of things to do as finding a satisfactory minimal-soil bokashi-to-compost solution. Have to say, though, this poster’s doing things I wouldn’t have thought of.

The process up right now isn’t one that appeals to me, but it makes interesting reading, and might suit some people’s situations. Also, fermenting newspaper? Very cool.

Hmm. If you combined the newspaper-fermenting technique with the newspaper cat-litter recipe from Allie’s Answers, using liquid soap made from local soapberries (and possibly omitting the baking soda), you’d have an impressively local bucket starter at, potentially, zero dollars spent... Someone want to try this?

Please?

I’d do it myself, but I’m all out of space!