My soil looks so yummy that you could eat it 😄!! Actually, this was the food I was eating, and it was so good that I decided to compost it into my soil!!!
What is Bokashi composting?
A couple of years ago when I moved into my new place that had a garden, I started to do Bokashi composting. Bokashi compost is different from normal composting in that you can compost any food, cooked or raw including bones, meat and fish to it. As long as it's not too wet, you can compost the food. Bokashi is an anaerobic method, that means you keep the food in a sealed container without any air. Inoculated bran is spread on top, and the bacteria in the bran help to ferment the food. So strictly speaking, we're fermenting here, and not composting yet.
This is what a good bucket of bokashi compost looks like. And yes, it's supposed to have white mold in it. If there is green or blue mold or it smells bad then something has grown wrong in the process, eg the food waste was too wet or too chunky, too much air got in or there wasn't enough bran. In the two years since I've been doing this, I've only had one bucket of bad bokashi that I had to discard.
How do you bokashi compost?
Here's the set up for the process. Two buckets for the food waste, and the bran. The bottom of the bucket has a drain tray because there will be some liquid that has to be drained away. That's what that little tap is for. This is the bokashi tea and contains a lot of enzymes. It can be diluted to feed plants or poured directly down the drain. That's what I normally do, it helps to keep my drains nice and clean.
I need two buckets for this because once the first bucket is full, it needs to sit for at least two weeks to continue fermenting before I can compost it. In the meantime I can start to fill up my food scraps in the second bucket. I normally let my first bucket of bokashi sit until I need the bucket again. That depends on how long it takes me to fill the second bucket, and that in turn depends on how often I cook at home, and what I cook. Normally, I fill up a bucket every 3 to 4 weeks.
And now the composting part. Simple, I just dig a trench in the soil and tip it in and cover it. This is similar to how some people do trench compost, but you can only add green waste there, and not raw stuff and meat. You can still see the food here, like the orange peel and bones. They haven't disintegrated and gone all horrible and mushy. Think of them as being pickled. Their look hasn't changed, just the structure is starting to change inside. And because it's been pickled, there's no bad smell, and pets and rodents won't dig it up.
At this stage, I can't plant anything here yet because the bokashi is too acidic. I need to wait at least another 2 weeks.
In my case, I normally do the bokashi compost only outside of the growing season because I add the bokashi directly into my planter. I can't do that when I have stuff growing in it. I separate my planter into four sections, add the bokashi into different sections each time, and go around again when I've done all four.
Over winter, I should have added 2 or maybe 3 buckets in each section enriching the soil and to get it ready for the next growing section. I think maybe this coming year, I might continue throughout the growing season and compost the bokashi in a separate big bucket.
My thoughts on bokashi composting
When I first started bokashi composting 2 years ago, I was worried that I might get it wrong because it sounded a bit complicated. I was worried that it might smell (the buckets are kept indoors), that the meat might go bad and turn disgusting, that it would attract rats to my garden etc. Luckily, apart from one bad bucket, none of that has happened and the whole process is very simple once you get the hang of it. I love how I can recycle all my food waste to help the environment, and most importantly of all, my soil is very rich. Even my sister says so, and she knows a thing or two about gardening!!! I have a lot of wiggly worms in my soil and I'm pretty sure that's why some of my plants and veggies have done so well this year.
Have you heard of or done bokashi composting before? Let me know in the comments. And if you want to find out more about bokashi composting or try it out, make sure to read up about it first. This is a good website https://bokashiliving.com/how-does-it-work/
